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Examples of Strategic alliances, joint ventures and mergers please....?

Can you please give me real cases where companies have merged together, had a strategic alliance of some sort or had a joint venture, preferably in the car industry, but any sector or industry will do!

Any links will be appreciated... the best answer gets 10 pts!

Public Comments

1. JPMorgan Chase was formed from several "zero premium" mergers:

First Manufacturers Hanover with Chemical Bank
Then with Chase Manhattan
Then with JP Morgan
Then with Bank One

Don't know if can call the Bear Stearns thing a merger.

Look up JPMorgan Chase on wikipedia.

2. I would look towards the banking and especially the airline industry. In the latter, 'One World Alliance' and 'Star Alliance' and so forth are merely strategic alliances (not mergers or acquisitions) which are more powerful than most people expect. I used to work for an oil company which was very squeezed by these alliances in terms of price and service.

Some airlines within these alliances have gone further and combine flight operations while dividing marketing and so on. It gets quite complicated but look for Swiss vs. TAM, or Iberia and LAN, or BA and Iberia, SAS and BA and so on.

In terms of banking, look at the history of companies such as JPMorgan Chase (-cum-Bear Sterns), or UBS Warburg (now Warburg again), or RBS and Natwest.

In the car industry Ford is an excellent example. They went on a shopping spree under Jacques Nasser in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially buying up companies to form part of their Premier Auto Group (PAG) - including Jaguar, Volvo, Land Rover (I think?) and so on. They also bought Kwik Fit (a UK repairshop that was later sold to private equity investors), and they have the world's largest or second largest retail credit company (Ford Finance, which in itself joined arms with Mitsubishi finance for a time).

Ford is a typical example of an organisation which was committed to a Matrix strategy (see papers by Karel Williams and Julie Froud).

I also think that many automakers try to press down prices on steel, aluminium and spare parts - one prominent way of doing this is to combine forces and pressure the supplier. It's had limited success.