UW Cross-border M & As Approval And Closing Project Management

Merger and acquisition (M&A) has been widely used as an important approach for business development. UW is a hi-tech company based in China with global operation. While seeking for organic growth through in-house development, the Company is also trying to drive the growth of its core business in overseas market by means of acquisitions of equity, business or assets. However, as a Chinese private enterprise, UW is facing tougher governmental approval and closing issues than its western peers in its cross-border M&A activities, especially in the United States. Over the past five years, most of UW’s M&A transactions in the United States (US) have been blocked or retrieved during the communication or review stage by the Committee of Foreign Investment in US (CFIUS). Based on the specialty and complexity of cross-border M&A approvals and closing activities, this thesis is trying to research on how to take the approvals and closing as a sub-project of the M&A deal and use the project management methodology to perform the project feasibility assessment, scope management, stakeholders management and communication management, so as to increase the success rate of UW’s M&A efforts and provide guidance for future transactions.The thesis firstly discuss about relevant theories and concepts, including the project management theory, cross-border M&A theory and the concepts of approvals and closing. Then it provides an overview of UW’s history of internationalization and M&As as well as UW’s project management practices in cross-border M&As, which leads to the introduction on the current status of UW’s cross-border M&A approval and closing management. Based on experiences from real M&A cases, this part gives a detailed analysis on the problems in UW’s current approval and closing management from four perspectives:project feasibility assessment, scope management, stakeholder management and communication management. Next, based on the foregoing analysis, is the design of a project management solution to address UW’s cross-border M&A approvals and closing problems. By referring to the overall project management framework from PMBOK, the design is mainly focusing on management solutions in four modules:project feasibility assessment, scope management, stakeholder management and communication management and illustrating how to incorporate the approval and closing sub-project into UW’s existing M&A process to form a systematic solution. Furthermore, the thesis introduced a case of UW’s recent acquisition of joint-venture’s equity shares from a US company. The case study describe how UW’s project team has consider the transaction feasibility from approval and closing perspective during the project initiation stage, how to perform effective scope management, stakeholder management and communication management; what actions the Company has taken to ensure successful closing and how the project has finally completed all the approvals and closing activies. This case study has demonstrated the effectiveness of the project-based management solution for M&A approvals and closing. Finally, the theisi gives a brief summary of the research contents and solution as well as an introduction of directions and topics for future researches.Based on research of existing theories and concepts, combining the methods of theretical and empirical analysis, this thesis is trying to apply the project management methodology in the management of cross-border M&A approvals and closing efforts. The purpose is to effectively and efficiently manage the M&A approval and closing activities and provide practical guidance for UW to smoothly solve problems in cross-border M&A approvals and closing.