Ivan Glasenberg Quotes

Any dope with a checkbook can buy a company. It's what you do afterward that matters.

The key to making acquisitions is being ready because you really never know when the right big one is going to come along.

It's not wise to limit firms' expansion projects. Let us only be limited by the market.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

Follow sound business trends, not fashion trends.

If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don't create value in most cases.

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off.

Start small; get to know the landscape. We take risks but not major risks. We always started with small capital - €4m in Holland, $10m in Russia - and as we get to know the landscape of a country, we think about other businesses.

I consider a merchant someone who has a certain intuition and instinct, and - very important - knows how to run a business, knows the numbers.

Anybody can do a deal. The tough part is doing the deal at the right time, being strategic.

The Ranbaxy acquisition doesn't preclude us from making more large acquisitions. The important issue is whether we have the management bandwidth to handle the acquisition.

The few times that Soros has ever criticized me was when I was really right on a market and didn't maximize the opportunity.

I love using a targeted acquisition approach in conjunction with a business that has a clear strategy and strong organic growth.

The way deals are done, every idea is looked at 50 different ways. Now, the market continues to change all the time. And we are always looking at everything in evaluating how it fits with our strategy.

Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.

In pharma, we continuously look for acquisitions... if it makes strategic sense and if there is any value.

It's a lot easier to figure out how to scale something that doesn't feel like it would scale than it is to figure out what is actually gonna work. You're much better off going after something that will work that doesn't scale, then trying to figure how to scale it up, than you are trying to figure it all out.

Valuations are always much-debated. I try to center on what is the value to us. Is it solving a problems for us? If it is, we find a way to proceed. If the valuation has been overhyped on something and it doesn't make sense, we won't. It's very simple for me. I tend not to worry too much about the valuation. It's really what the value is to us.

I propose that matchmaking should be approached like a corporate business venture. It can be risky, but I have discovered that the potential profits from acquisitions and mergers cannot be underestimated.

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.

If it's commercial and it makes sense we'll be doing it - whatever it is.

The rigor and discipline we use in running our business is key to consistently executing our growth strategy. And we systematically applied the same discipline to our investments, including acquisitions.

I always tried to move up the food chain. I started with cement and then moved into textiles and banking. When I was trading sugar, I added salt and flour so that then we could do pasta. And then I thought, why not make the bag for it, too? So, we started making packaging.

When you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work.

Really, we don't look at deals as 'big' or 'small': we look at things that will solve a problem for us.