Quotes About M&A

M&A at Microsoft is a team sport for the senior leadership group. They're all involved in it, and we all play different roles. My role is the first centralized business development role at Microsoft.

Business development is a part of M&A - we identify signals in the market, whether its trends or disruptive technology, and bring them back and address the opportunities. I have three levers I can pull - partnerships, acquisitions, or investments.

Our investment bank looks like it does because its customers like our expansive network and want to do equity, debt, M&A, custody, move money, deposit money, et cetera.

Noise about carrier M&A will heat up dramatically in United States and India. The pent-up demand for action is there.

Success in M&As comes with executing with vigour along with the obvious right choices that you got to make.

If your strategy calls for you to be in America, then you will go into America. If your strategy calls for you to be in M&A, then you'll do an acquisition. You usually acquire a company to acquire technology, geographic advantage, etc. Similarly, geographic expansion is very much like M&A. It's done to advance a strategy.

Over the next six months, we discovered the company had been pursuing deals in an ad hoc, opportunistic way, struggling in four key areas: identifying which companies to acquire, performing due diligence on these companies, calculating their value, and integrating acquisitions into our business. Taking stock of our deficits led us to a powerful, four-step model for pursuing M&A

I'm having yet another dinner, but this time with more of the working-level capital markets origination bankers. These guys are considerably more risk averse; they don't have the stomach for sales and trading and lack the smarts for M&A.