We are all familiar with Facebook’s strategy of acquisition all of the worldwide used companies and apps before they start making big money. Even though he started very young, because of his good strategies, Mark Zuckerberg became one of the richest people of all times in just a few years. But not everyone got that lucky. Some companies made that big mistake for merging some other company that they still can’t run out of debts. Do you know what were the worse merges and acquisitions in tech world ever?
Merges and acquisitions of rising companies require big efforts and bigger piles of money. The plan is to return that amount of money in less than a year and earn at least a double in the second. Unfortunately, the stock world is very fragile, which makes each merge and acquisition very risky at some point. But some companies just know how to make a right call. For example, Microsoft acquired Skype, which turned out to be one of the best deals they ever made. But don’t forget that LinkedIn is not an individual company anymore since Microsoft Corporation decided to make one bigger step further and bought this platform of $26 billion last year. On the other hand, they made several bad calls during the last couple of years, at least when it comes to merging. Fortunately for the company, these calls, although very bad, couldn’t beat the other ones that made Microsoft Corporation the multimillion dollar company.
The biggest problem with merging and acquisitions is that you can’t be sure until some time passes if you made a right call. Look at the News Corp and MySpace for example. MySpace was the forerunner of today’s Facebook and it seemed to all users that they will never fall apart. Via this platform, you could do as much as you could with the original Facebook and it looked like the big price to sharks. One of them was the News Corp that managed to acquire it for $580 million. One year later, even though acquired for only $580 million, MySpace was evaluated to be worth $12 billion. Was it because News Corp had the glory beat them in the head, but after the year of 2007 there were just series of bad judgments that had to lead to selling it to Facebook which later on sold it to Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake for only $35 million. Not something that News Corp should be bragging about. But it is too late now since we all know what happened.
This acquisition is among 11 worst tech merges and acquisitions ever. Click on the link and subscribe if you want to see the rest.
