Suchergebnisse

This volume of Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy is devoted to research aimed at understanding success and failure factors of mergers and acquisitions in entrepreneurial firms. Contributions are multidisciplinary and cross-cultural, and tackle key issues from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives

The 1990s witnessed an enormous wave of mergers and acquisitions dramatically reconfigure the market structure of global telecommunications. In Europe and the U.S., telecommunications firms have steadily consolidated into a shrinking pool of providers, rapidly oligopolizing the industry. This paper reviews the number and size of mergers and acquisitions globally in the 1990s and charts the national patterns of purchasers and target firms, noting the overwhelming hegemony of American corporations. The reasons behind this process include globalization, deregulation, the convergence of digital technologies, the search for economies of scale and scope, and U.S. corporate tax laws. It also points to the impacts of this oligopolization on consumer prices, labor, equity of access to telecommunications services, and the political and cultural repercussions of increasingly concentrated ownership.