Medium-sized companies and post-acquisition performance: a focus on Italian market

Italy is one of the most attractive European destinations for FDI inflows worldwide. The question of whether mid-sized Italian firms improve their performance in the post-acquisition years is crucial, since the Italian economy has been traditionally founded on “national champions”. The work aims at investigating (at firms’ level) the performance differences of all the mid-sized foreign-controlled firms, compared with the non acquired firms in the manufacturing industry. The study confirms that foreign acquisitions improve mid-sized firms performances. In the research is evident that Italian firms have access to larger markets and to a bigger amount of managerial and financial resources from which they gain better international performances. This study for the first time analyses the performance implications of cross-border acquisitions of all the acquired mid-sized firms, which carry remarkable economic weight within the Italian economy.