Wall Street shrugs off Microsoft's aQuantive write-down

Wall Street doesn’t think that Microsoft’s $6.3-billion aQuantive failure was a big mistake.

In fact, MarketWatch said shares were up 0.3 per cent at $30.64.

Pearson Education says that many M&A deals fail because of flaws in business logic, integration and corporate development, among others. 

Around 85 per cent of failed acquisitions can be attributed to HR issues, according to Keeley Mooneyhan Director of M&A Practice with HR Matters. 

The IT industry has many spectacular M&A failures. One example is AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner in January 2000 for $164 billion, which saw Time Warner’s shares jump 39 per cent to $90.06. In December 2009, the two companies split. 

But M&A failures are not complete failures. Inc. Wire reports Google’s VP of Corporate Development, Mr David Lawee, as saying at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2012 that though one-third of Google’s acquisitions have failed, it has still won because it has managed to get good people through acquisitions.

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