Financial Performance of M&A: Focusing on E-commerce Companies in China

With the rise and rapid development of the “Internet+” economic model, the internet is deeply integrated with the social economy and penetrates every corner of life. Compared with expanding the scale of business operations through internal investment and capital accumulation, e-commerce companies are more inclined to directly gain control of other companies through efficient merger and acquisition (M&A). The purpose of this study is to analyze changes in financial performance before and after M&A of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company in the Internet era. To present the impact of M&A events on Alibaba’s stock price and shareholder wealth more intuitively, this study selected the market model in the event study method to measure abnormal returns. The results show that an M&A event led to a reduction in Alibaba’s shareholder wealth in the short term. This study presents the theoretical basis for the M&A performance of e-commerce companies.