Mergers Quotes

I prefer owning something and partnering with other people, instead of like joining something.

I've had a terrific life, from building one company to be the second largest company in the securities industry and merging that into American Express, and becoming president of that company.

I think a lot can be said for consolidation, but I think it should be done for the right reasons.

In reviewing my uneven record, I’ve concluded that acquisitions are similar to marriage: They start, of course, with a joyful wedding — but then reality tends to diverge from pre-nuptial expectations. Sometimes, wonderfully, the new union delivers bliss beyond either party’s hopes. In other cases, disillusionment is swift. Applying those images to corporate acquisitions, I’d have to say it is usually the buyer who encounters unpleasant surprises. It’s easy to get dreamy-eyed during corporate courtships.

If you're thinking of acquiring a company and want to keep it a secret, tell everyone in the company; let them all in on the truth. Say, 'Listen, if this gets out, we'll probably lose the deal, so we're all in this together.'

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

Towards the end of 2005, Ineos acquired Innovene, the petrochemicals arm of BP, for $9 billion. It quadrupled the size of Ineos overnight and brought with it some of the world's largest industrial sites.

If you have six corporate centres, six treasuries, six of everything, and then if you bring it down to one of everything, obviously there are some savings.

Divestitures have long been the preferred remedy for horizontal mergers, where there's an overlap between the two companies. Airlines, for example, may have to sell routes or airport gates where the two airlines compete; cable operators may have to sell operations in cities where both companies operate.

The reason we avoid the word 'synergy' is because people generally claim more synergistic benefits than will come. Yes, it exists, but there are so many false promises.Berkshire is full of synergies - we don't avoid synergies, just claims of synergies.

We're extremely excited about the assets that Yahoo has in the areas of Sports and Finance and Email and News. You match those up with AOL, and we've just made an exponential leap in capabilities here.

Look, rich people already have a lot of money. There's literally trillions of dollars in cash held by corporations, their stock valuations at an all-time high. They do not need a tax cut to do anything. They can invest now, if they wanted to. They don't want to, because they can make more money just by mergers and stock buybacks and stuff like that. So, this is really just sort of a travesty.

Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.

M&A is always an opportunistic tool to grow a company.

Size is the enemy of excellence in investment banking, particularly when you are trying to put together two different cultures.

The Internet is a powerful way to make lots of money... But we are not going to buy Yahoo!

Travelex has grown into a global business in just 25 years. The acquisition of Thomas Cook's Global & Financial Services has created a business that would have had a combined turnover of U.S. $28.4 billion in 2000.

One of President Reagan's first and wisest initiatives was to effectively shutdown the anti-trust division of the Justice Department.

Drop the mind and the divine. God is not an object, it is a merger. The mind resists a merger, the mind is against surrender; the mind is very cunning and calculating.

In 2003, Travelex acquired Thomas Cook Financial Services. We only had use of the Thomas Cook name for five years, so I had to increase public awareness of Travelex to migrate all Cook operations over to it. It was a success.

There were eleven publishers in New York City, and when it was all over, I think it went down to four or five, and then finally just the three of them, the Big Three.

Typical mergers happen when there are two competitors coming together, and they reduce overhead.

Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'

When German companies take over firms in India, it is seen as normal. When an Indian buys one or two firms in Germany, that is something special.

Speed is the No. 1 thing. Our core competency has been doing exactly this: buying companies and integrating them quickly.