Post-Lehman M&A rewarded by market

By Quentin Webb

LONDON (Reuters) - Stock markets rewarded companies such as Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and Cisco (CSCO.O) who were brave enough to make acquisitions in the months after Lehman Brothers' collapse, a study released on Monday showed.

Although firms who made purchases worth $100 million (61.3 million pounds) or more suffered an average 25.5 percent fall in their stock price, they outperformed the wider market by 6.3 percentage points, the Towers Perrin/Cass Business School research found.

Global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) plunged 40 percent in the first half of 2009 to $941 billion, as shrinking economies, volatile markets and scarce debt hammered corporate confidence. The World Bank forecasts the global economy will shrink 2.9 percent this year.

"Companies with M&A in mind should be emboldened by our analysis: fortune favours the brave," the study's authors, led by Marco Boschetti, wrote. "Fears that M&A is riskier post-Lehman seem to be misplaced."

Repeat acquirers did even better, on average outperforming the MSCI World Index by 8.1 percent.

Among them, Cisco Systems, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories (ABT.N), BG Group (BG.L), and Symantec (SYMC.O) all outperformed world, regional and sector indexes.

However, other multiple acquirers such as Eli Lilly (LLY.N), Medtronic (MDT.N) and Banco Santander (SAN.MC) underperformed on some or all measures.

Boschetti said some acquirers were relatively weak, so the study did not simply reflect stock outperformance by strong companies, and he said stock reactions tended to be a good predictor of longer-term value creation.