Corporate Relatedness and Wealth Creation in the Machinery Mergers

In this paper we shed additional light on relatedness research and examine how capital markets value different value chain integration and diversification strategies in mergers. We focus on a sample of 330 machinery industry transactions, as this industry compromises strongly varying business strategies concerning focus on core business, diversification and vertical integration. We find a generally positive relationship between strategic relatedness and excess returns, supporting the theoretical benefits outlined in academic literature, including efficiency improvements, diversification of risk, mitigation of information asymmetries and increased market power. However, we observe that capital market reactions for vertical/complementary transactions are twofold. While integration of downstream industries is almost value neutral, control over subsequent stages of production (upstream mergers) shows similar positive returns as horizontal transactions. In addition, we observe that merger success is not determined by underlying market characteristics (such as market growth and industry concentration), but primarily by the acquirer's performance and experience