The global economy penetrates into each other, and in order to cope with the competitive pressure from home and abroad and gain a better foothold in the market, large and small enterprises are expanding their market share and enhancing their core competitiveness through various efforts. At present, there are two main ways for enterprises to expand: one is to start from within the enterprise, strengthen enterprise management, improve the utilization rate of resources and equipment, and accelerate enterprise innovation to improve their own competitive advantages; The other is to face the outside of the enterprise, through mergers and acquisitions(M & A) of other enterprises to obtain more resources, to achieve synergistic development, or to carry out diversified operations, open up new markets, in order to enhance the value of the enterprise. The merger and acquisition is the acquisition party's control over the target enterprise through different methods. Mergers and acquisitions may involve multiple parties, usually stronger enterprises acquiring weaker ones. The specific motivations of mergers and acquisitions include four aspects: based on management decision-making, obtaining synergies, reducing transaction costs, and achieving market expansion. There are various ways to classify the types of mergers and acquisitions, and the criteria for division must be determined first, and the classification results of mergers and acquisitions are different depending on the angle selected. By studying different ways of mergers and acquisitions, this paper finds that different ways of mergers and acquisitions will have different effects on enterprises. It is suggested that enterprises should choose different ways of mergers and acquisitions according to different motivations to maximize the benefits of mergers and acquisitions.

Lei Zhu. Research on Merger and Acquisition Motivation and Methods. Academic Journal of Business & Management (2024) Vol. 6, Issue 12: 63-68. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJBM.2024.061208.

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