Pro Merger And Anti Merger Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

Pro Merger And Anti Merger - Essay Example This draws the attention of media to the spate of marriages. The articles had shown a slew of divorces from trade to local to business press. The most recent ones are the AT&T’s announcement of its division into four entities – business, broadband, wireless and consumer and separation of British Telecom into retail and wholesale segments in its fixed line business in UK. It is difficult to identify the logic behind the changes in activity. In the world of mergers and acquisitions, the chaos still remains. The deeper analysis shows the consolidation of industries conforming to set of laws. The companies analysing the position of their industries on the consolidation curve and developing strategies according to that led them to win. The study conducted by A.T. Kearney shows that a distinct pattern is followed by the activity of consolidation. It makes progress in four phases with varying lengths. Mergers vary proportionally in reverse order to the extent of consolidation. Each consolidating industry passing through four different stages are opening, accumulation, focus and alliance. The time period from first stage to final stage stretches over 20 years approximately. An industry can increase its merger and acquisition from starting at low level of concentration till the saturation is reached. The activities of merger are also dependent on the movement of stock. The rising stocks provide considerable acquisition currency to the companies (Maire and Collerette, 2010, p.281). Massive deregulation in economic sectors and growing globalization also affect consolidations as the levels of stock market affect it. They drive stock prices and consolidation. Consolidation also boost stock prices because the top management is judged in terms of growth usually on its performance and also because the mergers open the access to international capital markets. Other than the phase specific development and cross industry patterns, there are other factors that accelerate industry consolidation like capital market pressures, globalization, advent of internet, technology infrastructure to support networking. More value can be achieved by the company which is demanded by the capital markets through acquisitions and mergers. The infrastructure of technology providing the facility of communicati on to companies outside their own walls influences the activity of consolidation. The communication via internet and potential of integration facilitates the management of complex enterprises. This makes more mergers and acquisitions possible. As companies strive to get bigger, market fragmentation is followed by consolidation waves. On reaching a certain degree of concentration, the mergers decline. The businesses focus on its core competencies at that time until it no longer look for merger and acquisition rather it choose alliances. Knowing the phases and patterns of the activity of merger and acquisition enable the knowledgeable players understanding the scene of merger in their industry, evaluating the

Functional languages vs. imperative languages Essay

Functional languages vs. imperative languages - Essay Example Imperative languages are greatly influenced by the von Neumann architecture due to their high dependency on an instruction counter and a store. They have control structures, like for loops and while loops, which make incremental changes to the memory while iterating over instructions. Programs written in imperative languages are statement oriented, and their principle operation is the assignment of values to variables; in other words, computation is performed with side-effects (Lee 118). Unlike imperative languages, functional languages do not rely on the Von-Neumann architecture as they do not have any concern with variables but only data objects and values. The principle operation of functional languages is function application, and they treat functions as first-class objects that may be stored in data structures, passed as parameters, and returned as function results. Programs written in functional languages contain no variables, loop statements, and assignment statements, and use parameters and return values to communicate values; in other words, computation is performed with no side-effects (Lee 119). Imperative languages heavily rely on side-effects to implement their state and perform their operations. On the other hand, functional languages lack side-effects which allow them to always produce the same result when given with the same parameters. This characteristic of functional languages is called ‘referential transparency’ which makes the semantics of these languages far simpler than the semantics of imperative languages (Kedar and Thakare 6-4). In functional languages, the return value of the function can be of any data type including function type. But this is not possible in imperative languages; functions defined in imperative languages are restricted to return values of specific data types (Kedar and Thakare 6-4). Programs written