The star-crossed companies began wooing each other a full year before they made it to the altar and consummated their corporate marriage, adding sizable girth as their already well-endowed coffers. Yuck!
New Line Cinema / Via astrology-zone.tumblr.com
It really is the year of the deal. Comcast has agreed to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, Valeant has teamed up with Bill Ackman to make a hostile bid for Botox-maker Allergan, Facebook is snapping up everything it can (except Snapchat, but not for lack of trying), and Apple bought $3 billion worth of cool in the form of Beats, Jimmy Iovine, and Dr. Dre. All told, there was roughly $805 billion worth of merger and acquisition activity around the globe through March, up 23% from last year according to Dealogic.
With that deal deluge comes self-congratulatory press releases, massive fees for investment bankers, and a flood of cliches from financial journalists using the same few relationship metaphors to write up yet another merger or acquisition story. Here's a compendium of how corporate anthropologists describe the courtship rituals and mating behavior of businesses in the wild, both from this year and years past.
"Wooing"
BBC / Via gph.is
"Dell's board and the prospective buyers have wooed investors for weeks, hoping to persuade them into accepting a deal they argue is the best path forward."
-- The New York Times , July 31, 2013.
"The company's initial opposition to a merger faded under pressure from its creditors' committee, and Mr. Parker aggressively wooed AMR by appealing to its unions, striking a tentative deal with the airline's workers before formal talks between the two companies had begun."
-- Reuters , April 15, 2013.
"Vivendi's unloved SFR wooed by suitors amid merger talks."
-- Bloomberg News , February 28, 2013.
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