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Case Study

Feeding the dragon: Revisiting ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta

By Benoit F. Leleux and Jiajin Wang

21 pages

December 2024

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Reference: IMD-7-2577

Basel (Switzerland), March 2024. The acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina in 2017 was a major event for the agricultural industry and, with a price tag of $43 billion, the largest ever foreign acquisition by a Chinese firm. A number of issues were flagged by analysts as key concerns, including governance, post deal integration, culture conflicts and a lack of synergies. With hindsight, were those concerns valid or had they failed to capture the overarching rationale for the Syngenta deal? Why did the Syngenta board support the transaction when so many other western firms rejected such approaches? More remarkable even was the fact that the CEO brought in to manage the complex acquisition, Eric Fyrwald, was still in place seven years after the transaction, an inordinately long tenure for a chief executive in any setting. What were the keys to this remarkable longevity? How did Eric manage to combine these two hugely different entities into an even more formidable giant? What did it take to balance the cultural sensitivities of Swiss and Chinese shareholders and managers? Could lessons be learned for other executives put in charge of complex, multicultural, transformational acquisitions? The success rate of M&A transactions was notoriously poor: What made this such a different animal?

Learning Objective

Managing post-merger integration in multi-cultural settings
Developing a China strategy
Defining proper governance in a multinational company

Keywords

Settings

ChemChina, Syngenta,
2017-2024

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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