Industry 4.0 Inc.—Mergers and acquisitions and the digital transformation of German industry

Abstract

How does digitalization change corporate governance in German industry? Does it lead to further atomization of inter-corporate relations in the race for the development and deployment of technologies and skills, or can we discern new forms of cooperation and coordination against the backdrop of institutional legacies and the pressure to adjust industrial business models? The present paper engages with these questions with a focus on industrial firms’ own digital agency, a less understood aspect. We identify the development and deployment digital technologies and the proliferation and integration of the corresponding skills portfolios as a dual challenge. With a focus on the German political economy and on mergers and acquisitions as one of the principal tools to overcome this dual challenge, we analyze more than two decades of M&A deals to explore shifts in acquisition activity and to map corporate linkages and overlapping investments. One of the consequences of this activity is the emergence of interconnections that have given rise to a new structure, which we term Industry 4.0 Inc. and which is likely to induce further collaboration among participating incumbents.