Managing Vivendo as a successful acquisition in six phases

Vivendo is a Magento Commerce integrator, that will officially relaunch coming Monday. The relaunch team, will strengthen our Magento and open source integration expertise, and expand our position in the European webshop development market. Especially, our position on our Dutch home market will be solidified.

A relaunch, after bankruptcy, is never easy. In general, a take over, in whatever format is never easy. Business statistics say that 80-90% of mergers & acquisitions (M&As) fail to deliver. That means: the buying price is higher than the value add for the shareholder. In a few cases a merger or acquisition is followed by a divestment or the acquired company fails altogether.

In the 10-20% of the M&As that are successful in terms of delivering a value add in terms of shareholder value, it is found by business researchers that professional roadmap is followed based on previous experiences.

Therefore, we decided to handle the Vivendo acquisition as a study case for which we developed a roadmap, that we want to reuse for following acquisitions. We are checking the steps of the roadmap, and specifying each next phase before we enter it. We split the phases in a Due Dilligence phase, Bidding Phase, Transfer Phase, Consolidation Phase, Investment Phase, and finally Business-as-Usual Phase in which we expect target profitability. We expect to reach the last phase after six months after takeover.