Firm Incubation through Business Group Affiliation: Acquisition and technology transaction (Japanese)

IPOs and acquisitions provide important opportunities for new companies to grow. This study focuses on the effect of business group affiliations on encouraging technology transactions within the group. In such acquisitions, the acquired firms remain as legal entities either as wholly owned or partially owned firms and retain management autonomy. If such business group affiliations promote technology transactions, in addition to providing risk capital, they provide significant channels for accelerating the growth of such firms. Our investigations show that within-group technology transactions by acquired subsidiaries increased significantly following the acquisitions, even when excluding the transactions which are part of acquisition deals. However, such effects exist only for wholly owned firms. Additionally, the transactions increased even if we pooled the within-group transactions and those with the firms outside of the business group. When including technology transactions directly associated with acquisitions, intra-group transactions account for a large portion of the total technology transactions, and corporate groups are one of the most important sources of technology transactions.