Technology-oriented M&A, market reaction and innovation output

Purpose The purpose of technology mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is to achieve innovation. The authors use the data from the China Patent Research System of China National Intellectual Property Administration to classify technical correlations into three types: similar, complementary and nonrelatedness (cross-sectoral category). And the authors explore three issues: the market reaction to technology-oriented M&A, the impact of technology-oriented M&A on goodwill and how technology-oriented M&A affects innovation. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from China Patent Research System of China National Intellectual Property Administration to classify technical correlations into three types: similar, complementary and nonrelatedness (cross-sectoral category). And the authors explore three issues: the market reaction of technology-oriented M&A, the impact of technology-oriented M&A on goodwill and how technology-oriented M&A affects innovation. The empirical research shows that the cross-sectoral M&A is popular in the market and is positively correlated with cumulative abnormal return (CAR) and premium rate of M&A. However, the technology-similarity M&A, which is committed to in-depth exploration of original technology, is negatively correlated with CAR and goodwill. Findings The empirical research shows that cross-sectoral M&A is popular in the market and is positively correlated with CAR and premium rate of M&A. However, the technology-similarity M&A, which is committed to in-depth exploration of original technology, is negatively correlated with CAR and goodwill. In addition, empirical results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between technology-oriented M&A and innovation output, and the inflection points are 41.8%, 48.9% and 38.8%, respectively. Originality/value The research contributions of this paper are as follows: first, most domestic studies simply and roughly measure the degree of technical relevance based on whether the firms belong to the same industry and whether there is common knowledge between them, but the authors provide a more accurate measure of technology-oriented M&A. Second, in the research on the economic consequences of technology-oriented M&As, a large number of literatures have mainly focused on the innovation performance of the acquirer after deals, including the number of patent applications, the number of patent citations, innovation output, etc., and they pay less attention to its impact on the market reaction and goodwill.