As the saying goes, what goes around comes around. A little over two years ago Glencore completed their highly-touted ‘merger’ with Xstrata, leading to what was anticipated to become one of the largest mining conglomerates in the world with combined sales at the time of...
A nice - and unusual - way to round up the year: two large-scale, highly-prominent 'mergers of equals' are both showing signs of...
Another report has been recently published from Intralinks and Cass Business School yet again telling us that actively acquisitive businesses perform better than those that don’t do M&A; you can download it here. As you can probably tell, I’m rather sceptical about such reports, especially...
I’m speaking at this conference next week and I’m excited and pleased to be there. It comes as a timely point as BTD continues to expand in the region. Pick up any M&A related press article, blog or news feed and it will tell you that...
Last week we presented at the HR Transformation, Talent and Employee Engagement Forum in Zurich organised and run by Thought Leader Global. I was there two years ago and from my perspective the discussion then was about matters of a transactional nature; specific HR functions...
PUBLISHED IN THE AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW, 30 JULY 2014 The “soap opera drama” around the merger between South Africa’s Woolworths and David Jones deal will put pressure on the company to show some fast results, an expert in post merger and acquisition integration says. Carlos Keener, founding...
I’ve been reading Sir Christopher Kelly’s report which is published today on the near collapse of the Co-operative Bank (Co-op) brought about (in part) by the botched takeover of Britannia Building Society. For such a large institution to have made such fundamental and catastrophic errors...
Ian Woolsey, formerly of GlencoreXstrata, has joined BTD as an Associate Director, effective 1 April 2014. With 25 years of experience in IT strategy & organisational change, ERP implementation, and post-acquisition IT integration, Ian brings with him the experiences of a CIO and Integration Director...
Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, has called attempts by rival holding groups, Omnicom Media Group and Publicis Groupe to form a £23 bilion "merger of equals" "impossible". "They talk about this being a merger of equals, which is technically impossible. From an accounting point...
In January 2014 BTD released the results of research into leadership behaviours that influence long-term M&A performance. In the first of this series of comments, we consider the most well-recognised: Deal Fever: "The deal takes on its own dynamic. Negatives are overlooked, and so are any...