Hi, this is our first lecture on mergers and acquisitions and private equity. Today we'll be talking about why do companies have the need to merge or to acquire one another. We'll be dealing with private equity and how companies raise money and for what purposes they might raise money at a later stage. But for now let's talk about why companies need to merge or acquire one another.
Now primarily companies need to merge or acquire one another because They either need to drive better efficiency and bring down costs within the company itself or Second to increase their market share. Let's take a couple of examples So a few years back, let's say you are a telecom company and a few years back There is a new company on the market that is selling the very same goods and products and services as you are selling But they're selling it at a very very low cost or for free now, you know that this is anti-competitive and you've gone to the Competition Commission of India, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it. So you're losing out on your customers, you're losing out on market share.
What do you do? You can either bear the brunt or you can consolidate with another company. That's exactly what Vodafone and Idea did. They consolidated themselves, they merged to bring their customers together to create India's largest telecom company as on date. Now this is an example of a merger where Your your market stake is well at stake by the way by the means of an external force called Jio right.
Let's take another example let's say you're an automobile company that is well known throughout the world but you know for a fact that India as an emerging economy as an emerging market does have a market appetite for passenger cars so as Volkswagen AG you set up a subsidiary in India which will then manufacture and sell cars in India and perhaps even export cars manufactured in India at a cheaper rate to all parts of the world. Both of these examples are examples of companies either merging or acquiring or setting up new avenues so that they can increase their market share. Another way to increase your market share is to acquire other companies. For example Walmart acquired Flipkart in order to increase its market share in India or at least to start increasing its market share in India. Of course, this festive competition in the form of not only Amazon but also Reliance which is now entering the e-commerce segment.
So one of the main reasons why companies merge or acquire one another is to increase their market share. Another reason why companies may want to acquire one another or merge is to increase or decrease costs and increase efficiency. For example, if you have two companies coming together and they produce the same goods, they produce the same services, then certain departments of both companies could become, let's say, redundant.
You don't need to have as large an HR team or as large a finance team or as large a non-core operating team that you would need to have in two separate companies. When you merge, the teams can be reduced and therefore The number of employees that you have can overall be reduced, thus driving down costs for the merged company. So these were the two major reasons why companies choose to merge and or acquire one another.
One major difference you should know is that under Indian law which is based in UK common law and has flavors of US law as well is that the difference, the key difference between a merger and an acquisition acquisition is that the end result of a merger is that one of the companies as part of the merger will cease to exist in so far as the registrar of companies is concerned which means that one of the companies will be rendered defunct and be struck off the roads. While the merged entity could have the names of both entities for example Vodafone Idea Limited, right? So that's a company now, but the original Vodafone company or the original Idea company One of them would have ceased to exist. In an acquisition, however, both companies exist, continue to exist as separate legal entities.
It's just that one company will become the subsidiary of another. So this was the first lecture on why companies undertake mergers or acquisitions. In the next lecture, we'll be talking about what are the modes of doing so or the types of M&A.