CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS WITH REFERENCE TO RECENT TRENDS

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are increasingly being used all over the world to improve the competitiveness of companies by gaining more market share, widening the portfolio to reduce business risk, entering new markets and geographies, and capitalizing on economies of scale, etc. In India, too, they have become a matter of everyday occurrence. They are the subject of interest counting for different individuals, such as business executives who are looking for potential merger partners, investment bankers who manage mergers, lawyers who advise the parties, regulators concerned with stock market operations and growing business sectors in the economy, and researchers who want to understand these concepts better. It is also said that a lot of mergers are simply acquisitions. One company purchases another and integrates it into its own business model. Many statistics on mergers are presented for the combined mergers and acquisitions (M&A) that are occurring as a result of this misuse of the term merger, because of which mergers and acquisitions can be treated as the same even though they are different from each other. The trend of merger and acquisition in India began in 1988 when Swaraj Paul attempted a hostile takeover of DCM Ltd. and Escorts Ltd.[1] at a time when the only mergers in India were friendly family mergers or friendly deals with pre-negotiated terms. These mergers were few due to the unfavourable provisions of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1969 (MRTP Act, 1969).