Corporate strategy planners have never had it tougher. Companies are bracing for the worst economic year in more than a decade. Disruptive technologies and new competitors continue to proliferate. Capital markets are a storm of discontinuity, allocating capital among winners and losers, encouraging the creation of corporations, and removing them when they no longer perform.
In this environment large companies are particularly vulnerable.1 Even as some corporate icons have relied on their sheer size and momentum to survive, they have not created superior shareholder value. One approach to countering such turbulence, our research shows, is to emulate the dynamism of capital markets within individual companies. Companies that "trade" their corporate portfolio—developing a balanced M&A program that actively allocates capital to acquire new businesses, encourages their growth, and then sloughs them off in a timely fashion—can create superior shareholder returns.
Active, balanced M&A programs outperform
We identified 200 of the largest companies in 1990 that were still trading independently in 2000 and examined all their acquisitions and divestitures during that period that were more than $100 million.2 We ranked and then compared the performance of the most active one-third of the group, based on total number of completed acquisitions...