International mergers and acquisitions of greek business in South-Eastern European countries,an empirical study

Abstract

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) issues become central public and corporate policy issues. They represent a major force in the modern financial and economic environment, an area with potential for both good and harm. The impetus for the increased activity in the last years could be found in many factors: companies were trying to position themselves for the 21st century. Recently in Greece, M&As have grown rapidly as part of this widespread corporate restructuring on the worldwide landscape. The main objective of this paper is to force the characteristics and to estimate the degree of activity in mergers and acquisitions that Greek enterprises have hade the last decade in some South-Eastern European countries. Our aim is to examine: which are the strategies that the Greek companies followed for their M&As activities and how could they be formed in a country of South-Eastern Europe (legal part of the paper), the M&A transactions that have been done (cash payment, stock-for-stock exchange, etc.), last but not least, from an economic perspective, which are the sectors that realize M&As and if those M&As are pro or contra-international trade oriented. For this specific empirical study of analyzing the activities of M&As that Greek enterprises have had, we will proceed to a statistical analysis of data from a sample of Greek businesses. The selected cases are companies listed in the Main Market of the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) and have performed, at least, a single M&A activity in one country of our research. The selected countries of South-Eastern Europe for our sample are Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania.