An Appraisal of Domestic Mergers and Acquisitions in Nigerian Banking Industry : Three-Year Pre and Post-mergers and Acquisition Event

The concept of mergers and acquisitions has been an interesting area of study in the literature of finance (Sharma, 2016). As a confirmatory study following extant literature, this paper examines empirically the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the performance of banks involved in M&As in the Nigerian banking industry. With the aid of financial ratios and t-test, the post-merger performance of seven banks listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) that completed an M&A at a time (t0) 2005 was investigated. Selected accounting variables (financial ratios) were introduced to measure operating performance by making comparison of three-year pre, and three-year post-M&A firm performance, while the year of M&A event is omitted from comparisons as in extant studies (Leepsa & Mishra, 2013; Pazarskis et al. 2006). The study found that whereas, Nigerian banks were profitable post-M&A, the wholistic performance was found to be poor