Management consultants are famous for coming up with figures showing how many mergers fail.
Usually it amounts to more than half. That’s why there was scepticism about the merger of Banco Santander and Banco Central Hispano in early 1999. Would it create more problems than gains?
A year and a half later it’s becoming clear that the Spanish can teach the world a thing or two about mergers. Modestly, they retort that it was the direct experience of going through bad ones – the merger of Bilbao and Vizcaya in the 1980s being the prime example – that showed them how to do it right.
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