M&A Performances
Samsung and Lotte were the most active among the nation’s top 30 business groups in the mergers and acquisitions field over the past seven years. CJ ranked first in terms of the number of M&As.
According to CEO Score, a service specializing in large business group financial performance, on November 20, the nation's top 30 business groups have spent a total of 58 trillion won (US$49.28 billion) to buy 280 firms from January 2010 to November this year.
By the total spending, Samsung Group, the nation’s largest conglomerate, was ranked No. 1 with the total spending of 11.3 trillion won (US$9.6 billion), followed by Lotte with 9.7 trillion won (US$8.24 billion), Hyundai Motor with 5.56 trillion won (US$4.72 billion), SK with 5.76 trillion won (US$4.31 billion), POSCO with 4.9 trillion won (US$4.16 billion), CJ with 4.1 trillion won (US$3.49 billion) and Hanwha with 3.57 trillion won (US$3.04 billion). By the number of M&A cases, CJ was the most active company with 46 firms, followed by Lotte with 28, LG with 25, Samsung with 21 and SK with 19.
Samsung accounted for 20 percent of the total spending for M&As. The company bought seven foreign firms out of 21. In addition to Harman International Industries Inc., it purchased mainly firms with the technology competitiveness in Silicon Valley, such as Grandis Inc., a maker of non-volatile memory, mSpot, Inc., a leading mobile cloud contents service provider, Nvelo Inc., a software company specializing in solid-state drive (SSD) caching, and Joyent, Inc., a leading public and private cloud provider.
Lotte Group bought up KT Rental and Hi-Mart, followed by Samsung Fine Chemical and Samsung BP Chemicals. In other countries, the group also purchased the New York Palace and Titan Chemicals, a business-to-business chemical firm based in Malaysia. Hyundai Motor Group acquired mainly large South Korean firms including Hyundai Engineering & Construction, Hyundai Special Steel and Mando Advanced Materials.
CJ ranked sixth in terms of the total spending for M&As with 4.1 trillion won (US$3.49 billion), while it took first place in the total number of M&A cases with 46. The group had 22 more M&A cases than Lotte, which ranked second in terms of the number. Except for last year, it had continuously bought up five to 10 firms in the cable TV, media and content sectors every year as well as food firms. CEO Score included only firms which large business groups completely acquired the management rights through M&A and provided an accurate takeover price on business reports.