A Comparative Analysis of Takeover Regulation in the European Community

Abstract

There can no longer be any question that Europe has gained the attention of U.S. business. Many of the largest and best known U.S. companies, including such household names as Hewlett-Packard, Phillip Morris, and AT&T, are increasingly looking to Europe as their largest potential growth market in the 1990s.1 Perhaps even more significantly, the drive to expand sales and operations within Europe has been especially great among the fastest growing companies in the United States. For example, of the twenty Silicon Valley companies recently named to Fortune magazine's list of America's 100 fastest growing companies, more than half receive between one-third and one-half of their revenues from international operations. Moreover, many of these companies (and their competitors) claim that international operations, particularly revenues in Europe, represent the best opportunity for growth in the decade ahead. The drive to expand in Europe has been spurred, at least in part, by the European Community's (EC) proposed unification by the end of 1992. U.S. companies are well aware of the carrot and stick contained within the unification program: a company that enters any EC country prior to 1993 obtains barrier-free access to the world's single largest market, containing more than 340 million consumers, and to one of the world's wealthiest and