Crossing Borders, Creating Value: Financial and Operational Effects of Nordic M&A in CEE's Critical Sectors

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines whether cross-border acquisitions by Nordic investors improve the financial and operational performance of firms in critical sectors in Central and Eastern Europe. Motivated by Europe's growing focus on strategic autonomy, geopolitics, and friendshoring, the study assesses outcomes in industries such as energy, transport, and digital infrastructure as defined by European investment-screening and critical-entities frameworks. Using international transaction data matched to detailed firm-level financials, the analysis constructs a panel of Nordic-acquired and comparable domestic firms and applies propensity-score matching, difference-in-differences estimation, and event-study techniques to evaluate post-acquisition changes in profitability, efficiency, asset utilization, and revenue growth. The results show that Nordic ownership does not yield uniform improvements across all sectors, but several industries exhibit clear and economically meaningful gains. Transport and storage stand out with consistent improvements across margins, returns, and revenue growth, though evidence mainly applies to small, specialized firms. Construction and professional, scientific and technical activities also show medium-run improvements: despite short-run profitability pressures due to restructuring, event studies reveal later gains in asset utilization and subsequent profitability. Agriculture similarly shows a delayed but positive trajectory. By contrast, information and communication technology, administrative services, and parts of manufacturing display limited or negative effects, suggesting weaker complementarities and greater integration challenges. Overall, the findings indicate that Nordic cross-border acquisitions can strengthen important segments of Central and Eastern Europe's critical sectors, particularly where sector conditions support operational upgrading and target firms possess latent improvement potential, even as impacts remain strongly sector-dependent.