As a students who wants to engage in the field of accounting in the future career, I am very interested about Merger and Acquisitions (M&A) issues for companies. Apparently, to decide whether the company will take part in M&A, the decision-maker of the company first is supposed to consider about the profits M&A brings. And then the company can decide what kind of means they will adopt in the procedures of M&A.

In the article, the author Bruner (2001) utilizes several main means or categories of analyzing. First, he analyzes the measurement of M&A profitability in different ways of study, such as event studies, accounting studies, surveys of executives, and clinical studies, and he summarizes the approach, strengths, and weaknesses of each research method.  Then, he analyzes the market-based returns to shareholders including returns to target firms, to buyer firms, and to both buyer and target firms. Besides, he talks about findings based on the analysis of reported financial performance, findings about the drivers of profitability, findings from surveys of executives, findings from clinical studies, and conclusions of reviewers through time.

Based on the mass of research, Bruner conclusively suggests the business practitioner to be coldly realistic about the benefits of acquisition and I tend to support his statements. He states the necessity of carefully structuring deals, of particularly avoiding overpaying. Plus, he encourages the people to work very hard to achieve the economic gains they hypothesized and to take nothing for granted. I fully agree with what he emphasizes finally that M&A is no money machine, and may well not offer the major career-building event people wanted. In a word, it’s a really complicated process to analyze the pros and cons of M&A comprehensively. Also, it’s a really hard task for the manager of a company to make decisions about whether to take part in M&A. The manager needs to consider issues comprehensively and make scientific and systematic decisions.