Abstract

Liberalisation in the European electricity market greatly increased the number of corporate mergers and acquisitions. This article proposes a taxonomy of the strategic behaviours of European electricity firms after the recent continental industry liberalisation. We analysed the operations of mergers and acquisitions of these companies. The «five competitive forces» model by Michael Porter was used in order to develop the taxonomy. Our analysis outlines three main strategic types: "omnivorou"s firms, which merge and/or acquire all the types of companies, without any strategic distinction; "cannibal" ones,which are firms preferring direct competitors as targets for their operations; last, "herbivorous" firms, which acquire mainly companies belonging to the other four Porterian forces.