Course Overview

Corporate restructuring may be undertaken alone (e.g., eBay's spinoff of PayPal, or Google's organizational restructuring into Alphabet Holdings), or can lay the groundwork for follow-on M&A, leveraged buyout (LBO) (e.g., Dow Chemical merged with Du Pont). The strategic roles of the private equity fund and hedge fund become more important for facilitating either restructuring and M&A. To start a career in investment banking, consulting services, buyout specialists, you need to get familiar with domain knowledge and to keep abreast of contemporary global M&A and restructuring events. This pedagogical vision motivated this course.

Learning Achievement

The purpose of this course is to teach relevant domain knowledge of the acquiring firms for pursuing synergistic or undervalued targets worldwide. Before or after M&A, asset restructuring can be a must to achieve strategic renewal and organizational reinvention for legitimacy and profitability. In addition, effective integration of merged firms and then restructuring non-core assets also contribute to the success of post-merger growth and operations. We are interested in the motives, planning, decision-making, valuation, and negotiation of such transnational equity transactions. Moreover, many developed-country firms have suffered lost market share or innovativeness abroad and domestically, which opens the strategic window of equity-linked restructuring modes with emerging-market counterparts. In addition, M&As have been used by global players to restructure and even strengthen their global deployments of resources, capabilities, talents. We are going to study several latest cases in achieving these strategic objectives e.g., Lenovo acquired Motorola from Google to strength its patent portfolio and brand equity in mobile devices in 2014, then to restructure its global supply chain in 2015. The types of global M&As include stock-based merge, cash-based acquisition, and LBO. Once completed, cross-border takeover deals need to get approval from the regulators of both home and host countries. In addition, the acquiring firm entails ownership rearrangement, asset revitalization, employee redeployment, organizational transformation, and resource integration. Those restructuring efforts are critical for enhancing economic, accounting, and social value.

Competence

Course prerequisites

As to the pedagogical approach, we are going to discuss core theories, best business practices, inspiring ideas, seamless implementation, and policy implications in class. Class participations and Teamwork involvements are expected, which accounts for most of your final grade. After completing this course, you should be confidently undertaking projects of global M&A and corporate restructuring. This is an inter-disciplinary course that lays its groundwork on entry-level courses in management, finance, and organization. Thus, basic knowledge in these subjects (or equivalent), though NOT regarded as pre-requisites, contribute to effective learning. You can expect to learn timely professional knowledge and experience in global M&A and corporate restructuring. The instructor commits to enhance your understandings of strategic thinking, decision-making framework, corporate valuation alternatives, and restructuring/integration action programs that are "working surely".

Grading Philosophy

Course schedule

Course type

Online Course Requirement

Instructor

Hong-Jen Chiu

Other information

(College of Management) Department of International Business,
(College of Management) Department of International Business,
(College of Management) Graduate Institute of International Business *Registration eligibility: juniors and above.

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