The hostile takeover is about as exhilarating as it gets up at head office. It’s the chief executive suite as campaign tent, complete with hurrying advisers, councils-of-war, swift-changing tactics. For leaders who favour the military style, this is as close as it gets to being a real general - the plan, the strike, the capitulation and the prize. Sadly for them, the hostile bid is becoming less fashionable, but acquisition remains a perfectly reasonable, if usually less dramatic, strategic option for companies of all kinds.
Mergers and acquisitions - ‘M&A’ in investment banker-speak - attract more public attention than anything a big company does except, perhaps, firing half the workforce or going bust. Typically, they happen when one company acquires all the assets and liabilities of another. Is there a difference between a merger and an acquisition? Not very often. A true merger is a marriage of equals in which shares are pooled in a new company, and these are unusual. Car makers Daimler-Benz and Chrysler merged in this spirit of equality in 1998, taking a new name - DaimlerChrysler - to reflect this. Even so, American commentators now complain it was a de facto takeover, with German management and know-how calling the shots.
