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In this study, we analyze the general effect of acquirers’ ownership strategy on the survival in foreign acquisitions. Furthermore, we attempt to address five potential moderating effects: international, regional, target country experience, cultural distance, as well as host country development. The developed hypotheses are tested on a sample of 1,345 acquisitions made by 174 Finnish firms in 59 countries during 1980–2005. The results indicate that in general WOS increases the probability of survival of foreign acquired units. We further find that the impact of WOS on the survival of foreign acquired units is contingent upon cultural distance and host country development but not on the experience of buying firms.

The international market entry strategy by acquisition is one of the critical options for success in international business. The decision to acquire a local firm is expected to impact the post-entry financial performance of the local firm as the acquirers come with proprietary advantages to improve the overall performance of the acquired company. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the post-acquisition financial performance of acquired foreign subsidiaries and comparable unacquired local firms in Ghana to determine the effect of foreign acquisition on the financial performance of the local subsidiaries.

A quantitative approach was adopted in this study. A sample of 100 locally acquired and non-acquired firms were studied using purposive and convenience sampling method. The research adopted the propensity score matching and the differences in difference methodologies to determine the returns on assets (ROA) of non-acquired local firms and acquired foreign subsidiaries are compared one year pre-acquisition t₁ to two years post-acquisition t₂.

The results demonstrate a higher post-acquisition financial performance of locally acquired foreign subsidiaries in relation to their local counterparts in Ghana. Firms with pre-acquisition modernized ownership structures performed better than state-owned firms and firms with high pre-acquisition absorptive capacity outperformed firms with lower pre-acquisition absorptive capacity. The results also indicate that ROA for acquired local firms in the year of acquisition drops in relation to the year prior to acquisition

A major limitation of this research is that the relative capability of the parent companies and experience in the transfer of knowledge to the acquired local subsidiaries was not considered. The real impact of the various multinationals would have revealed how the capability and competencies of the different parent companies whose subsidiaries this study considered in the paper make a difference in their performance. The study did not also consider the value of parent company participation in the local management of the acquired subsidiaries. Whereas some acquired firms had parent company staff participating in the local management, others did not have same, thus challenging the performance results without any control of this variable. The other limitation of this research is the fact that it did not also consider the experience of the parent company as a factor that can influence the performance of the subsidiary. The more experienced the parent company is in engaging foreign markets, the more likely the support for the subsidiary will result in higher performance as parent company brings previous learnings. Another limitation of this study is that it measures the financials only (ROA) and hence does not provide a 360° assessment of the subsidiary performance, which includes the operational and overall subsidiary effectiveness. This research has not empirically examined all aspects of foreign acquisitions in Ghana and thus has many aspects for future exploration that other researchers may focus on. The paper has not considered the experience and capability of the parent company to transfer technology, innovation and all the advantages of multinationals to the post-acquisition performance of subsidiaries. More experienced multinationals are most likely to transfer knowledge faster to subsidiaries than less experienced ones, thus likely to show better performance post-acquisition than the less experienced ones. The effect of this phenomenon has not been considered in this study. Parent company participation in the local management of the subsidiary can also make a difference in the post-acquisition performance equation but this has not been considered in this research. Some parent companies actively participate in the local subsidiary management as management support for the subsidiary. This might have some effect on the subsidiary post-acquisition performance but this study does consider this. Other researchers may want to look into this factor. Future researchers may also assess the differences in performance of subsidiaries that are wholly owned and partial owned in Ghana. The performance of Greenfield joint ventures and local firm acquisitions can also be studied.

Findings of this research has implications for firms using acquisition as foreign market entry strategy to inform the choice of local partners to select for acquisitions as pre-acquisition ownership structure and absorptive capacity of local Ghanaian firms impact post-acquisitions performance. Ghanaian firms also seeking to attract foreign investments into their businesses will also find the results useful as they organize to meet prospective acquirers’ expectations, for example, building their human capacity and ownership structures, developing export and ensuring debt rations to attract potential acquirers.

Acquisitions as an international market entry strategy continue to gain grounds with lots of research in the area. However, there is scanty research on post-acquisition financial performance, especially in the developing country context, and this paper fills that yawning knowledge gap by comparing acquired and non-acquired local firms in Ghana to determine if foreign acquisitions lead to better ROA.

Past studies on foreign corporate investment and wages hypothesize that by expanding into highly concentrated and highly capital intensive industries, foreign owners are better able to pay higher wages than their domestic counterparts. Our study tests this hypothesis by comparing the effects of domestic and foreign acquisition activity on union and non‐union wages. We find strong evidence supporting the ability to pay hypothesis. There is no indication of bargaining strength changing with foreign acquisitions, as such activity is not associated with larger union wage premiums. Union premiums, however, decline with greater domestic acquisition activity.

This paper aims to investigate how a Chinese firm’s strategic orientation impact its knowledge acquisition from its foreign alliance partners through governance mechanisms used in the Sino-foreign alliance partnership.

This research first proposes an integrated model which links a firm’s strategic orientations (entrepreneurial and market orientations), governance mechanism (contract and trust controls), and its knowledge acquisition together. Then, this research collected data from 198 Chinese firms involved in Sino-foreign alliances to test the conceptual model.

For entrepreneurial-oriented alliance firms, a moderate level of contract and a high level of trust are the most efficient uses of control mechanisms for Chinese firms’ knowledge acquisition. In comparison, for market-oriented alliance firms, both contract and trust control mechanisms should be used at the moderate level to achieve maximum knowledge acquisition from their foreign partners.

By introducing a new antecedent for the choice of control mechanisms in the context of Sino-foreign alliance relationships, this study empirically finds a non-linear relationship between contract control and knowledge acquisition and confirms the significant role of trust in facilitating knowledge acquisition between alliance partners from the perspective of alliance firms in emerging markets.

This paper seeks to examine how foreign subsidiaries of MNCs can acquire new local knowledge by focusing on two intra-organizational factors of learning mechanisms and formative organizational context.

A mail survey was carried out with top managers among manufacturing subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) located in Hanoi, Vietnam and Guangdong province of China. In total 123 completed questionnaires from MNCs in Hanoi and China were received.

The results suggested that training and mentoring and formative organizational context has positive association with knowledge acquisition. However, three interaction terms between learning mechanisms (experimentation, socialization, training and mentoring) with formative organizational context are significantly related to knowledge acquisition. Besides, the authors also found a positive and significant association between knowledge acquisition and subsidiary performance.

Building a formative organizational context directly promotes knowledge acquisition and increases the effectiveness of more informal learning mechanisms. Besides, a learning mechanism may work differently in different contexts, and foreign managers need to be aware of when to apply what mechanisms.

The paper argues that the alignment between organizational context and organizational learning mechanisms can help the foreign subsidiaries acquire new knowledge and improve subsequent performance. Local knowledge acquisition in MNCs should be conceived as a deliberate and managed act, requiring a careful selection of both formal and informal mechanisms supported by appropriate contextual conditions in foreign subsidiaries.

This paper aims to examine whether foreign technology acquisition is complementary to internal technology development in the context of a developing country.

The selection model developed by Heckman (1979) was applied with the balanced panel data of manufacturing enterprises from the Annual Enterprise and Technology Surveys from 2012 to 2016 conducted by the Vietnamese General Statistics Organization.

The results indicate that foreign technology acquisition and internal technology development are complementary innovation options. Particularly, the number of patents granted for manufacturing enterprises positively affects the probability that enterprises acquire foreign technologies. This effect is stronger in cases of high-tech industries than in cases of low-tech industries.

Regarding the relationship between internal technology development and foreign technology acquisition, the findings suggest that adoption of foreign technology acquisition and priority in budget allocation for foreign technology acquisition are different in nature and that budget allocation is a more complex issue and may depend on other factors.

For developing countries, governments should adopt policies supporting domestic enterprises in acquiring technologies from advanced countries that could complement the locally developed technologies. These supports should focus on the high-tech or high-innovation rate industries.

In the context of a developing economy, the complementary effect of internal technology development and foreign technology acquisition is stronger in cases of the high-tech industries than in cases of the low-tech industries.

When entering foreign markets, multinationals can acquire part of a foreign firm and can increase or decrease their equity stake over time. However, extant studies have mainly focused on equity stake acquired during initial market entry. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study fills this gap by using the Uppsala model to analyze six cases of international acquisitions of Finnish multinationals in global markets.

The authors found that firms change their equity stake in partially acquired foreign subsidiaries: when they have learned about the host country and businesses of the partially acquired firms, when they have gained target-specific experience, when they build trust and ensure relationship commitment and finally, when they jointly develop and exploit opportunities.

This study is one of the first to apply the Uppsala model to empirically analyze international acquisitions, thus paving the way for behavioral and process-oriented approaches. The study contributes to knowledge of post-entry strategies of multinationals.

Both, the UK and Japan abolished the tax credit system for foreign source dividends in 2009 in favour of the exemption system. With the move towards a dividend exemption system the governments intended to enhance the international tax competitiveness of their countries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the implications of substituting the credit system for the exemption system in the UK and Japan on cross-border transaction prices when competing for international acquisitions.

The paper uses an economic model under certainty to analyse the changes in cross-border marginal purchase and seller prices as a result of the introduction of the newly introduced dividend exemption system.

Shifting to an exemption system has ambiguous effects on the ability to compete for foreign acquisitions: investors from both countries are able to pay higher prices in the course of acquisitions, but while investors from the UK become more competitive, the relative competitive position for Japanese investors hardly changes and remains relatively constrained, independent of the form of double taxation relief. Thus the author verifies that the international tax regime is not the only determinant influencing the competitive position, ranking second to, e.g., the interaction with international tax rate differentials.

The international tax reforms in UK and Japan in 2009 offer a unique opportunity to study the impact of international tax policy on the international tax competitiveness of multinational firms in the course of foreign acquisitions. Evidence from this paper is not exclusively applicable to the UK and Japan setting. The observed effects shed new light on the intensified debate in the USA of changing the international tax system by analysing the impact on the bidding situation in international acquisitions in a real-world transition scenario.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of appointing foreign directors on the foreign acquired Turkish banks. Based on the developments in the Turkish banking system and the distinctive features of the Turkish market, the authors examine the appointment of foreign directors in three different levels: as a CEO, chairman and board member. The authors analyse how the appointments of foreign directors in each of these three levels affects the profitability and strategies of foreign acquired banks.

The authors use the difference-in-difference (DID) model where the authors compare two groups: foreign acquired banks vs domestic banks for a five-year period. By applying the DID model, the authors aim to remove the time invariant individual characteristics of the banks that could be due to the permanent differences between the two groups, as well as biases from comparisons over time that could be due to trends.

The authors find that the presence of the foreign chairman has a positive effect on the profitability of the foreign acquired bank and on the improvement of the income generated from interest activities, indicating that foreign chairman improves the monitoring of board of directors and brings new skills and experiences. Furthermore, foreign acquired banks are associated with an increase in the income generated from non-interest activities in the fifth year following their acquisitions, showing the introduction of new strategies. The change of the foreign acquired bank’s strategies in the fifth year after acquisition also suggests that it takes time to implement new strategies in a new environment.

Though the effects of foreign board membership on bank’s performance have been previously discussed in literature, this study differentiates in that it distinguishes among different positions, e.g. chairman or CEO when examining the effect of a foreign director on a foreign acquired bank’s performance. In addition, the use of foreign acquired Turkish banks in the sample in this context adds to the general academic literature.

In a contribution to the emerging research examining Chinese cross-border acquisitions (CBAs), the authors observe experiential learning applications for enhancing M&A completions. By emphasizing knowledge transfer, the authors reveal how target-to-target industry similarity and bidder-to-target cultural distance affect learning outcomes.

Using a binary logistic regression model, the authors examine a sample of CBA attempts announced by Chinese companies from January 2002 to December 2012 to identify the variables that affect the completion of CBAs.

The authors find that foreign acquisition experience but not domestic acquisition experience enhances subsequent acquisition attempts, especially when prior and focal target companies share the dominant industrial logic. Learning transfer is negatively affected when target countries are more culturally distant from China, but learning benefits appear to increase under strong bidder-to-target cultural distance.

By investigating learning in the precompletion stage in Chinese outward CBAs, the authors complement research that uses postacquisition performance to assess learning. The authors’ more fine-grained characterization reveals that acquisition experience increases knowledge transfer through experiential learning. Furthermore, the authors show that dominant industrial logic and cultural distance are underexplored contextual conditions, although they interact with foreign and domestic experience to affect the completion of CBAs.