Sashimi M&As: Monopolization by a Thousand Acquisitions

Many competition authorities have provisions for transactions of “minor importance” where the parties involved can avoid mandatory pre-merger notification.  Several industries have seen merger waves whereby consolidator firms engage in a strategy of “strategic rollups” – the serial acquisition of many small firms within a highly fragmented industry (“Sashimi M&As”).  In this article the literature on sequential mergers is reviewed and three industry cases are examined