Research On The Influence Of Media Pressure On Success Or Failure Of Chinese Enterprises’ Cross-Border M&A

With the continuous advancement of economic globalization and the implementation of the "One Belt,One Road" initiative,Chinese enterprises have accelerated the pace of foreign expansion around the world.At present,the characteristics of Chinese enterprises’ outbound investment are: the number of cross-border M&As has increased,but the scale has decreased,and the structure has been continuously optimized,and the investment fields are extensive.The advent of the "5G"(fifth-generation mobile communication technology)era has led to the rapid development of media types,information dissemination and user participation.The medias play an important role in corporate supervision and corporate governance,so by collecting the number of negative and non-negative(positive and neutral)reports reported by online medias,we study the role of media pressure in the process of cross-border M&As by acquirers,and how it will affect the outcome of cross-border M&As.As a personal trait,regulatory focus is a psychological concept,which has been widely studied at the enterprise level such as business management,human resources and management,and organizational behavior,and now it is extended to study different regulatory focuses of top management team,that is,how promotion focus or prevention focus will play a regulating role between media pressure and the success or failure of cross-border M&As by acquirers.Taking 835 cross-border M&A activities conducted by 488 Chinese listed companies between 2008 and 2020 as a research sample,this paper conducts an empirical research on the impact of media pressure on the success or failure of cross-border M&A of Chinese enterprises,and the moderating effect of top management team’s regulatory focus between the two.The results show that media pressure is significantly negatively correlated with the success of cross-border M&A,and media pressure is detrimental to the success of cross-border M&A by triggering negative opposition from corporate stakeholders.Promotion focus and prevention focus have a reinforcing or weakening effect on the above impact respectively,that is,promotion focus type of top management team tend to implement the socially-oriented stakeholder strategy can weaken the negative impact,while the prevention focus type tend to implement the governance-oriented stakeholder strategy can strengthen the negative impact.Subsequently,in order to verify the robustness of the above empirical regression results,three robustness tests were carried out,including the measurement method of substituting explanatory variables(media pressure),the measurement method of substituting regulating variables(top management team’s regulatory focus)and the replacement empirical regression test model,which effectively reduced the errors caused by variable measurement,variable selection and model selection,and select the annual average media pressure of the industry as a instrumental variable,effectively reducing the endogenous impact of the same industry on media pressure in the same year.The research conclusions may have certain theoretical and practical significance.On the one hand,this paper may enrich the media pressure as one of the factors affecting the success or failure of cross-border M&A,and the regulatory focus of the top management team plays an important role in major decisions such as cross-border M&As.On the other hand,in the actual cross-border M&A,the top management team of the enterprise should pay more attention to the negative media coverage of the enterprise,actively take measures to respond to the demands of stakeholders,and at the same time they should be aware of their regulatory focus,and to achieve a balance between collective motivation and practical needs,implement an effective stakeholder strategy,so win the support of stakeholders,and maximize the interests of the enterprise.