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PFIZENECA? Pubnicom? Holfarge? 一家著名的企业在经历完大并购带来的挑战之后，为新的融合体起了一个合适的名字。并购是投资银行家再次考虑的：在这么多年风平浪静之后，大兼并和收购正卷土重来。乐观者期望这是机遇的象征，因为经济前景正改善着。怀疑者纳闷着，管理者做这么大的并购，是否是为了掩盖，其对缺乏发展机会的担心——或者只是为了依靠与拥有较优惠税率的国家的公司并购，来削减开支。

不管是出于什么样的原因，有人希望辉瑞和阿斯利康，这两个制药公司，豪瑞和拉法基，这两个水泥公司，还有阳狮和奥姆尼康，这两个广告公司，如果它们之间的并购是真实发生的，那么希望可以起一个与时俱进的名字。在其它的大并购中（见表格），通用电气和西门子都在，向他们的工业对手，一家法国公司阿尔斯通出价。今年至今为止已经有15项交易，每项的价值均超过100亿美元，创下自从2007年并购热潮以来之最。说到小一点的交易，兼并比去年增长了接近50%（见图表）。而且仍在不断增加:5月1号的华尔街日报报导，美国电话电报公司正打算兼并美国直播电视集团，出价可能多于400亿美元。

PFIZENECA? Pubnicom? Holfarge? Finding a suitable name for a fusion of well-known brands is among the challenges of big takeovers. It is one that investment bankers are once again pondering: after years in the doldrums, big mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are making a comeback. Optimists hope this is a sign of bosses daring to be bold because of improving economic prospects. Sceptics wonder if the managers are in fact doing deals to conceal a worrying lack of growth opportunities—or just cutting costs by merging with companies in kinder tax jurisdictions.

Whatever the reason, one hopes that Pfizer and AstraZeneca, two drugmakers, Holcim and Lafarge, cement companies, and Publicis and Omnicom, advertising firms, will settle on snazzier names if their proposed unions do indeed take place. Among other big deals (see table), GE and Siemens are both bidding for Alstom, a French industrial rival. There have been 15 transactions each worth more than $10 billion so far this year, the most since the record M&A rush of 2007. Taking in smaller deals, mergers are up nearly 50% on last year (see chart). And still they keep coming: on May 1st the Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T had approached DirecTV about a possible bid worth more than $40 billion.

Yet even investment bankers, who are salivating at the prospect of the fees they may earn, are not sure if this spike is the real deal. A year ago, many interpreted the buy-outs of Dell and Heinz, purveyors of computers and ketchup respectively, to be the start of a new wave of transactions. The rest of 2013 was merely average.

There are several reasons to believe that this time the takeover tide will keep rising. Bosses accumulated a lot of pent-up dealmaking appetite during years when the credit crunch and then the euro-zone miasma made big takeovers all but impossible. Many of the combinations being proposed have been mulled for years, in contrast to the shotgun weddings dreamed up by pushy bankers in previous M&A waves.

American firms, the most active, are generating record amounts of cash but struggling to do anything productive with it. Having run out of scope for placating shareholders with share buy-backs, and having found that expanding into China and India was no panacea for their dim domestic prospects, they now hope that plausible-sounding mergers will do the trick.

Some American bidders have pots of cash in their foreign units that they cannot repatriate without paying heavy taxes. Pfizer has $69 billion of cash overseas, says Bloomberg, an information provider, by itself enough to make it one of Europe’s top 50 companies. Buying a rival in another country is one way to soak up that money.

The current crop of deals looks bigger in part bec本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。