Acquisitions are famous for a high failure rate, but so are companies in general. At every stage of a company's life, it faces significant existential risks. If

Acquisitions are famous for a high failure rate, but so are companies in general. At every stage of a company's life, it faces significant existential risks. If you're lucky, the checks keep getting bigger, but the risk doesn't go away just because business is going well. Especially if business is going well... So assume every significant business decision carries pretty significant risk and the best you can do is manage that risk better than the next guy. Companies acquire other companies for a variety of reasons, some better than others. There aren't any hard rules either--a right decision in one scenario might be exactly the wrong decision in another. The build vs buy decision is a much more complicated question than it seems at first. All of that to say, I'd wager acquisition failure rate isn't all that far apart from general business failure rate or even the failure rate of a company doing a project internally vs buying a company.