Joe Kaeser Quotes

Mergers generate substantial synergies.

Mergers and acquisitions, we are always looking for that.

A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

We get talent and scale from mergers.

We like the size of the company today given the environment and have no plans to split it up and make it smaller.

M&A guidelines need to be liberal.

We continue to see acquisitions as an opportunity area for us. It's one of the tools that we use to grow.

M&A is always an opportunistic tool to grow a company.

I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.

Today, public companies don't like the idea of conglomerates. People want to buy something in which they know where they are putting their money - into the food business or the oil and gas business. They don't want to put their money into a hodge-podge as a general rule.

A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction.

In the Sixties, conglomerates were all the rage.

I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.

Among the world's 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

I was very clear why we put these companies together and what our goals were. It was really to allow both Sears and Kmart to compete in what I thought was going to be a more challenging but evolving industry.

The consolidation that we started in 2009 was clearly the requirement of that time.

By 2002, I realized that what was classically called a rollup strategy was not generally effective, at least not for me.

I think a lot can be said for consolidation, but I think it should be done for the right reasons.

If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don't just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.

Yahoo would benefit from going private or becoming part of a larger corporation.

Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.

We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving.

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.