Premiums and Stock Price Responses in Equity-Stake Purchase Deals in Korea¡¯s Stock Market
Jin Park
Jungwon Suh
This paper examines a sample of 160 equity-stake purchase deals between listed companies over the period 2009-2017. The sample consists of deals in which acquiring firms buy at least 5 percent of the target¡¯s common stock but does not include mergers or acquisitions of the target¡¯s entire equity. Deal premium is measured by the difference between the deal price (per share) and the target¡¯s share price one day or a week before the deal¡¯s announcement. Our investigation shows that, although deal premium tends to increase with the size of equity stake in the target, deal premium is negative in about half of the sample and its median value is close to zero. Our regression results show that deal premium is positively associated with the won value of the deal size relative to acquiring firms¡¯ assets, but negatively associated with the quality of acquiring firms (as measured by operating return on assets) and the size of inside ownership of those firms. We also analyze stock price responses to deal announcements for acquiring firms and targets. For acquiring firms, the mean of their stock price responses, as measured by CAR(-2, 2), is not statistically significant, but their CAR(-2, 2)¡¡tends to increase with deal premium and the target¡¯s operating performance. For target firms, the mean of their CAR(-2, 2) is significantly positive (about 1.6 percent), but we cannot identify factors that are systematically associated with their CAR(-2, 2).