| Summary: | This paper is aimed at finding motives and assessing consequences of mergers,
acquisitions and strategic alliances of two world largest e-commerce companies'
Amazon.com and eBay. It overviews a vast amount of theoretical literature on
mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances incentives and presents empirical
literature findings on companies' financial and stock market's post-merger
performance. Case studies section of the dissertation examines the history and
motives of Amazon.com and eBay for engaging in mergers, acquisitions and strategic
alliances activity, and measures the consequences of this activity by applying
accounting and empirical financial approaches. Qualitative data is obtained from both
online and published resources; the findings are that:
1. Mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances contribute to increase in net
sales revenues and cumulative customer base.
2. However, their impact on market share can be either positive or neutral.
Quantitative data is taken from the companies' annual reports, business
research companies' archives and financial website, Yahoo! Finance.com. The
empirical models test four hypotheses, which concern the companies' financial and
stock market performance. The findings of these models can be summarised as
follows:
1. Mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances can have either positive or
negative effect on the companies' financial performances.
2. Mergers and acquisitions have either negative or close to zero effect on the
companies' stock market's performance.
3. Strategic alliances have strongly positive effect on the companies' stock
market's performance.
4. If strategic alliances are specified into marketing and technological
alliances, the impact of both types on the companies' stock performance
varies.
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