Bachelor Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 2,3, Northumbria University (Newcastle Business School), language: English, abstract: Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are some of the dominant topics of the economy today, because such a step has big influence on the companies’ development, the location, the employees and the other stakeholders. Such activities are seen as an instrument of the development of a company since a long time. Companies act or respond with it on competitive situations. The market for M&A expels in high volumes year by year therefore the interest of the public is accordingly big. The shareholders and the management of the individual companies play a very big role on that occasion. They make the decision for or against a merger and they are also the ones who will earn profits from such a union, or suffer also damage in the case of doubt through it. In order to find a solution of this problem, one needs a structured action and a lot of information. This work deals intensively with the topic of Mergers & Acquisitions and explains on the basis of two examples the possible development. On this occasion, it was distinguished from takeovers also between two different forms; the friendly merger and the hostile takeover. An especially big hurdle on the way to the new company represents the restructuring and integration of the acquired business into existing structures. Therefore one aim of this work is to show different possibilities of an after-merger-development; for example with Shareholder-Value-Strategies. Since this is often interconnected with enormous expenditure and high costs, this study deals with the possible consequences for shareholders and management, not only positive but also negative ones.