Shareholder Value Effects of Cross-Border Acquisitions Conducted by Poland’s Asseco Group

The purpose of the paper was to investigate the impact of cross-border acquisitions on shareholder value, to verify the impact of prior foreign presence for acquisition performance and to compare results of acquisitions into Eastern and Western European markets. Event method was applied for a sample of multiple acquisitions conducted by a single acquirer. While we find that cross-border acquisitions in the studied sample tend to destroy value, these findings are not statistically significant. We find a weak tendency for transactions constituting the first entry into the market to have slightly better outcome for shareholders than transactions constituting subsequent entries, which confirms market access hypothesis. While on average cross-border acquisitions do not create value for Asseco Group, their impact on shareholder value seems to be less adverse than in case of domestic acquisitions. Our findings suggest that Asseco, and perhaps other similar Polish companies, could use acquisitions to enter a foreign market, but subsequently grow in this market organically. The paper constitutes a first approach to study an underexplored topic of outbound cross-border acquisitions from Poland.