By Nishtha Garg

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are the acts of consolidating companies or assets, with an eye toward stimulating growth, gaining competitive advantages, increasing market share, or influencing supply chains. Companies merge with or acquire other companies for a host of reasons. One of the most important advantages offered by mergers and acquisitions is related to a wider range of services or products which can be explored. By joining forces, the portfolio of the new business can increase even more and gain access to a larger market share. Thus, they can diversify their portfolios. By combining business activities, overall performance efficiency tends to increase and across-the-board costs tend to drop, due to the fact that each company leverages off of the other company’s strengths. Mergers can also give the acquiring company an opportunity to grow market share without doing significant heavy lifting. Moreover, by buying out one of its suppliers or distributors, a business can eliminate an entire tier of costs. Lastly, many M&A deals allow the acquirer to eliminate future competition and gain a larger market share. Hence, Mario Gabelli’s rightly put it in words how M&As are two of the fastest and the safest approaches to earn truck loads of money!