Business students know the risks of mergers and acquisitions.
There are no perfect numbers on the issue, but according to Harvard Business Review, between 70% and 90% of M&A deals fail. Blockbuster collapses are well known. Among them are Time Warner and AOL, which joined in a $165 billion merger that unraveled when the internet bubble burst, and Hewlett-Packard‘s (NYSE: HPQ) $87 billion merger with Compaq, which led to years of underperformance in the personal computing industry.
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