Mergers and Acquisitions: expected vs actual performance. A set of case study assessments

Nowadays, when discussing about M\&A (Merger and Acquisition), scholars and professionals agree in saying that it is one of the widest and most complex area of financial assessment in which analysts could come across. This is not just because of the extreme variety of typologies, scenarios and parties involved, but also for the connection to other complemetary crucial fields of investigations, such as strategy or project/enterprise management, that severely affect the analysis of each single deal. Although affected by a high failure rate post-deal, the attraction of companies towards this type of external growth mechanism has just increased across years, and it seems to have a defined interesting way to distribute among periods. The following paper aims at introducing the most importance features of an M\&A operation and presenting which could be the potential Key Success Factors leading to a successful deal. Specifically, the panel of case study assessments proposed in the third chapter, focuses on two main purposes. Firstly, the concrete observations of theoretical topics, earlier introduced, and the comparisons of pre/post-acquisition metrics, looking at expected versus finalized performances on twelve transactions occured among the period 1999-2017, and that distributed in two defined industries, namely the automotive and the tech one. Secondly, it seeks to find empirical correlations among successful deals presented, till the formulation of some preliminary hypothesis around them and reasons about their positive post-acquisition performance metrics.