Chinese and Indian M&As in Europe: The relationship between motive and ownership choice

The present paper is about the ownership choices by Emerging Market Multinational Enterprises (EMNEs) when they invest in Europe through M&As, and the relationship with the main motivations underlying their international expansion. Namely, we claim that EMNEs prefer to acquire less control and keep the local partner when they invest for seeking knowledge. Additionally, EMNEs choose partial acquisitions in case of high dissimilarity in terms of culture, industry and knowledge base. <p> Our empirical analysis relies on a dataset of M&As undertaken by Chinese and Indian MNEs in high and medium-high tech sectors, in the period 2003-2011. We use content analysis of public announcements and company reports for classifying the main motivation of the acquisitions, and econometric analysis for testing our hypotheses. Our results confirm the expectations.