Industry consolidation as a strategy: an acquisition program perspective

2.1 Industry life-cycles and acquisitions

The extant literature on industry evolution phases points out that the industry life-cycles seem characteristic to proceed through phases of establishment, growth, leadership and renewal, and typically the level of industry concentration evolves from a low level early in the life-cycle to a high level in later phases (e.g. Deans et al., 2002). This intriguing industry-level phenomenon materialize in the varying company-level strategies and market actions. While one company may try to rapidly increase its market share and market power by acquiring others on the market that have already accumulated revenues, assets and customers (Klepper and Graddy, 1990), then again another company may try to take over rivals in the later phases after establishing industry understanding and innovations through knowledge acquisitions, which allow it to build competitive advantage or sustainable capability in some area (Karim and Mitchell, 2004). This temporal shift suggests that early entrants may have certain advantages over late-comers in that early-entrants build the industry's reputation and legitimize the novel industry as part of society more broadly (Kim and Park, 2006). Anyway, the temporal relationship between market formation and industry asset emergence implies that market consolidation is possible only if there are enough players with the right characteristics at the right time, indicating that there also is a correlation between the industry life cycle and the number of mergers.

Industries have been found to follow a characteristic consolidation curve over evolution; however, the model does not make strong distinctions between different types of industries (Deans et al., 2002). It turns out that asset-heavy industries follow the process more strictly due to high asset specificity (Riordan and Williamson, 1985). Several studies suggest that dominating companies in asset-heavy industries typically combine other players from the market by acquiring and integrating them (Alexandridis et al., 2012; Noam, 2006). It is well known that firms have several reasons to acquire and merge other companies, such as competence, resource or assets acquisition, market-entry, scale increase and a strive to decrease competition (Al-Laham et al., 2010; Berggren, 2003; Falch, 2006; Warf, 2003). In some rare cases, a one-off business acquisition can fulfil the objectives of a company, but typically companies face the pressures to carry out multiple mergers, and this is especially the case for multinational corporations (Greve and Mitsuhashi, 2004; Rosen, 2004) operating on an industry that has not reached its maturity (Anand, 2004). A company utilizing this acquisition strategy becomes a series acquirer (Smit and Moraitis, 2010).

When an acquisition becomes the major tactic for the growth of a company, a strategic acquisition program can be utilized to ensure the required stream of opportunities and coherent management (Chatterjee, 2009). In addition to enhanced strategic awareness and clarifying business logic, the acquisition program may introduce dynamic insights to a strategy in means of real-options (Smit and Moraitis, 2010), it can balance the formal and informal activities of acquisition coordination (Lechner and Kreutzer, 2010), and it may improve the processual understanding of capital allocation (Strauch et al., 2019). Thus, developing capabilities to pursue acquisitions and managing acquisitions may allow a company to focus on the actual assets of potential acquisition candidates rather than to the processual details of those.

Several studies show that the majority of acquisitions fail somehow (Doan et al., 2018; Homburg and Bucerius, 2006). However, another set of studies show that an acquiring company leveraging an acquisition program succeeds more often than a company without a program (Ansoff et al., 1970; Buckley, 1975). An improved success rate is not the only reason to deploy a program, but also reasons such as, clarified business logics, better identification of market inefficiencies and support for competitive advantage development motivate acquiring companies to deploy a programmatic approach to acquisitions (Chatterjee, 2009; Very, 2011). Although an acquisition program may help in planning, communicating and implementing strategic targets, it can be seen as an operational and tactical level tool for managing firm-level growth and providing support for the strategy.

The majority of the extant management literature takes a process view of acquisition programs. This is mostly due to the embedded temporal dimension in the programs. Chatterjee (2009), for example, concentrates on the stages of target identification, negotiation and integration, which are all operational phases in time. This process view posits the stages as a series of activities for one individual acquisition, but also as concurrent sub-processes in the overall program. Moreover, Rouzies et al. (2019) propose four separate sub-processes to the integration phase, namely, coordination, cohesion, disconnection and alienation, and suggest that these phases are not disconnected from the rest of organizational development but are highly intertwined in time and space. Yet, Colombo et al. (2007) observed that managing a geographically expanding program is a true challenge for multinational enterprises (MNEs) pursuing cross-border acquisitions, but a proper pre-planning, acquisition experience and previous relationship with the acquisition target influence positively the performance of managerial resources redeployment in acquisitions, and thus to the performance of a whole acquisition program.

2.2 Acquisition programs

Scholars on acquisition programs typically assert that a successful program can provide target candidates that have a good strategic fit. One way to measure strategic fit is to analyze possible synergies between the target and the acquiring company in financial terms (Clarke, 1987). The challenge in this approach is that it requires a significant number of details and facts from the target company in the phase where the acquirer does not necessarily have unlimited access to company internals. Moreover, some studies indicate that, despite proper planning practices in the acquiring firm, not all synergies identified in the pre-acquisition phase actually pays-off (Mahajan and Wind, 1988), but especially the seek for investment synergies tend to result in decreasing return on invest. Due to these challenges, there have been several efforts to ease assessing acquisition targets, using methods such as a directional policy matrix approach (Newton, 1981) that helps evaluate qualitative properties, a risk analysis approach (Hertz and Thomas, 1982; Thomas, 1983) that helps to understand uncertainties and a strategic fit measurement method (Clarke and Brennan, 1990) that helps to evaluate possible synergies in diversified business in financial terms. When these factors are linked to industry life-cycle phases, it can be assumed that finding a strategic fit between companies on the early life-cycle phases is more challenging than in the later phases in that company strategies vary more when an industry is novel but strategies tend to converge due to isomorphic nature of industry evolution in the later phase.

Part of the acquisition program literature focuses on communicating with and relationships with external stakeholders. For example, related to acquisition activities, companies typically need to disclose some future-looking plans and make predictions of their operations for external stakeholders such as shareholders, regulatory authorities and industry analysts (Graebner et al., 2017). It is beneficial for the company to disclose as realistic information as available, but at the same time to be able to keep confidential information private. An increase in industry-specific information disclosure, for example, is found to influence positively ownership stability (Gietzmann, 2006), and thus it decreases the risk of shareholder intervention. Moreover, the information collected through an acquisition program can help executives build an adequate reputation for the acquiring company on financial markets, which in turn helps to open access to the lowest-cost financing (Mazzola et al., 2006). As these examples suggest, the outputs of an acquisition program turn out to be boundary objects that can be interpreted differently based on the agent that interprets it.

Although a company and its executives may have developed a sound acquisition program which produces successful mergers, the process may also produce misfits for some reason. Both successes and failures provide learning opportunities for the company, but it is up to the capabilities of the company if it can actually benefit through these learnings. Baumard and Starbuck (2005) observed that not all acquiring companies were able to improve their operations although they faced failures such as (1) the over-estimation of customer demand, (2) attempted growth into a new domain that holds an excessive competition, (3) transferring an old model to a new situation although foundations have changed, and (4) escalation of commitment in a losing business. However, in other studies, companies were able to learn through certain failure events, such as divestitures due to erroneous acquisitions (Doan et al., 2018) and misalignment of strategies (Heracleous and Werres, 2016). Moreover, in the performance management literature, Dossi and Patelli (2010) elaborate that one of the key success factors for learning is the existence and use of performance measurement systems in a company, and the systematic monitoring of both financial and non-financial indicators helps company executives not only to improve strategic alignment, but also to improve dialogue between regions in MNEs. And yet, when an acquiring organization is searching for strategic options, it should learn how to find a balance between the extent of the search and the stability of options to avoid premature lock-in to the most obvious choices (Rivkin and Siggelkow, 2006). As learning becomes the crucial part of a successful acquisition program, it can be argued that a successful program may not necessarily seek minimized risks but rather ensure that insights from the previous acquisitions are leveraged to improve the performance of subsequent acquisitions.

While most of the acquisition program literature focuses on post-merger activities, there remains a question of what are the antecedents and prerequisites for a successful program. In a more general setting, the literature suggests four strategic perspectives which contribute to the formation of successful acquisition programs; legitimacy, alignment, resources and learning.

2.3 Legitimacy

Several strategy scholars agree that markets, rivalry and legitimacy are socially constructed, meaning that the cognitive images of an internal organization and external environment are formed by company managers and other stakeholders to interpret the context (Porac et al., 1995; Suchman, 1995). However, past experiences influence these individual-level interpretations, which, in turn, influence the strategic choices made by company managers (Bromiley and Rau, 2016). On the organizational level, in this cognition construction process, an organization collectively forms its identity and posits itself among peers in the environment to strengthen its organizational purpose and mission (Scott and Lane, 2000). When some event triggers a need for identity change, an organization has to rebuild its internal image, first by overcoming resistance to the change and controlling the emotions of stakeholders, and second by reframing the content of legitimacy judgments (Huy et al., 2014). These events may emerge, for instance, from corporate spin-offs (Corley and Gioia, 2004), mergers (Clark et al., 2010), or the formation of knowledge networks (Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018). These aspects suggest that forming or retaining legitimacy within an organization requires the mastering of the complex social process through instrumental, relational and moral evaluations (Tost, 2011), that in turn allows organization managers to build trust.

External stakeholders of an organization likewise evaluate the legitimacy of the organization through cognitive images. Market audiences rely on categories to interpret how the organization compares to other peers, and based on the judgments, the audience can penalize the organization if it was found to be non-compliant with the category (Hsu et al., 2009). For example, suppliers can price-discriminate downstream markets based on the perceived proficiency level of a customer (Dahan et al., 2010). In the early evolution phase of a market, it is typical that market categories are missing as market audiences have not yet formed the required structures to comprehend the behavior of an organization, and to overcome this limitation, the organization needs to actively help audiences to build these categories (Kennedy, 2008). This means in practice that, for example, the organization needs to acknowledge adjacent markets and competitors publicly (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001). However, it may turn out that the market audiences resist the change of underlying institutional structures, which may force the organization to change its legitimizing tactics or to acquiesce in the institutional context (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994).

2.4 Strategic alignment

Strategy can be defined in various ways. Mintzberg and Waters (1985), for example, propose that “a strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions” and not all these decisions are deliberate nor intentional, but some parts of the patterns may be highly emergent or even latent. To make these decisions, an organization needs to interpret events and changes in its environment to make sense of how it compares to others and what actions it has to take to reach strategic targets (Weick, 1995). However, it turns out that a company manager has no absolute control over these decisions, but several factors constraint these actions.

Constraining factors, such as a corporate structure, strategy planning practices, ownership structures and decisions made in history, they all influence future decisions. First, the distribution of decision-making power varies between corporate structures (Chandler, 1991). For instance, if the head-quarters (HQ) holds strong financial control, a subsidiary may have relatively large strategic decision-making power as long as the financial targets are met. Then again, if the HQ holds strong strategic planning control, the financial control mechanisms the subsidiary faces are relatively weak. Second, different modes of strategizing may produce different outcomes (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985). For instance, if top managers allow the emergence of entrepreneurial initiatives and distributed vision formation, they also have to acknowledge that the emerging strategic path cannot be fully anticipated. Or, if the industry holds a strong regulatory regime, the imposed strategy may be initiated by policy-maker. Third, the impact of company owners on selected strategies takes place through different mechanisms (Katz and Niehoff, 1998). For instance, external owner-controlled companies tend to select more profit-maximizing risk-taking approaches than, let say, companies that are owned by managers due to selective perception (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). Or, companies with strong external owner control tend to seek more scale-increasing acquisitions than companies with low external owner control due to manager's tendency to avert risks (Amihud and Lev, 1999). Moreover, corporate governance structures have been found to impact the financial performance of a firm (García-Ramos and Díaz, 2020), which suggests that strategies also are impacted. Fourth, decisions made in history imprint the firm's institutional context aligning future decisions (Patel and Pavitt, 1997). This path-dependent nature, together with selective perception, constraints the capacity of a firm to make changes to strategies. Hence, organizations need to anticipate this complexity by implementing adaptive and context-aware strategic capabilities.

The strategy literature includes several approaches to how this adaptation and awareness could be achieved. For example, Ocasio (1997) proposes an attention-based view of the firm to set frames for cognition-building activities. By structural distribution of attention, company managers can control the formation of situated attention and focus, which in turn aligns the formation of strategic plans and strategic implementation activities. In practice, this structural distribution can be implemented through the process strategy, which brings control on how the strategy is formulated and in which context, leaving the actual content open (Heracleous and Jacobs, 2008; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985, p. 264). These capabilities may in turn become the enablers of strategic alignment and competitive advantages.

2.5 Resource acquisition

A firm requires resources to be able to acquire the assets of another business entity. These strategic resources consist of tangible and intangible assets and knowledge (Teece, 1998; Wernerfelt, 1984), and with careful development and bundling, the firm may turn these resources into sustained competitive advantages (Barney, 1991). In the development of these competitive advantages, the firm may, for example, utilize iterative development approaches for resource allocation to avoid premature lock-ins and over-committing of resources, which would otherwise result in suboptimal opportunity selection (Noda and Bower, 1996). However, it turns out that some resources are actually scale-free and are not subject to opportunity costs, and as Levinthal and Wu (2010) argue, those scale-free assets should be utilized whenever possible by the firm. On the other hand, the authors also argue that those assets that are non-scale free and are subject to opportunity costs should be allocated critically to ensure optimal division of resources. Hence, the types of resources, the timing of allocation and the allocated use of resources turn out to be strategic decisions company managers need to make.

Firm resources are not disconnected from its surroundings but are highly embedded into the firm's wider dynamic environment (Grewal and Slotegraaf, 2007). Factors, such as technological evolution, changing industry structures and instability of market demand, constraint the firm's capabilities to utilize its resources efficiently compared to other industry participants (Sirmon et al., 2007), which in turn limits the firm's ability to efficiently value creation. Sirmon et al. (2007) propose a dynamic resource management model of value creation for structuring, bundling and leveraging resources within a high-uncertainty regime. This approach allows the company to strategically manage the resources it has also in the case of acquisitions.

2.6 Learning

Scholars on organizational learning agree that organizations need to take collective action on learning in order to survive and prosper in the long run (Bapuji and Crossan, 2004; Fiol and Lyles, 1985). While sustaining dynamic capabilities and knowledge resources are the end results of collective action, these processes require appropriate organizational routines, resources and knowledge reconfiguration practices to be able to realize (Easterby-Smith and Prieto, 2008). Håkonsson et al. (2016) argue that the adoption of new routines, i.e. learning, takes place when an organization perceives a recent sub-standard result within a positive habitat. This is especially true in the case of a backward-looking logic of stimulus-response learning (Gavetti and Levinthal, 2000), which suggests that organizations need to ensure the timely capturing of learning opportunities and fostering of a liberal environment for capturing errors embedded in the existing environment. Moreover, this routine changing activity may require some institutional work to overcome institutional stability, carry out reshaping and finally restabilize the practices (Zietsma and Lawrence, 2010). The strategy literature sees this change as a deliberate strategic renewal process, in which organizations learn and reconfigure themselves through characteristic renewal paths depending on environmental factors (Volberda et al., 2001). Hence, despite industry ambiguity and uncertainty amid the asset consolidation era, an organization needs to be able to reflect on its past events and anticipate future changes in the levels of operations, tactics and strategy to change its behavior based on the learnings.

Industry uncertainty may constraint the capabilities of an organization to perceive the market accurately. To overcome this ambiguity, strategic sensemaking may help company managers to interpret meanings of phenomena seen in the environment and to better identify its own identity within that context (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991). One of these sensemaking activities is the evaluation of an organization's fitness for its environment in terms of strategies, capabilities and leadership skills (Beer et al., 2005), which in turn enables the organization to improve its strategic management processes. In addition, the path-dependent nature of managerial decision-making may help identify changes more quickly adjacent to previous choices, but it may also prevent novel aspects from emerging (Bergek and Onufrey, 2014). Hence, learning through environmental factors requires an organization to be able to compare its present being and current actions to the existing environment and to compare its planned future identity and actions to the anticipated future environment. These interpretations allow identifying the actual change needs.

2.7 The research question and propositions

Most of the extant mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research focus on the post-acquisition phases of M&A processes or on the specific strategic aspect of acquisitions. Despite a few meritorious papers on acquisition programs (Chatterjee, 2009; Doan et al., 2018), the literature is rare on strategic acquisitions programs focusing on industry consolidation or specifically on the industries that are assets-heady such as telecommunications infrastructure. However, several signs indicate that the pre-acquisition strategic planning practices and strategic decisions linked in the industry life-cycle phases hold a significant impact on the stream of successful acquisitions. As telecommunications infrastructure has become critical for modern societies, it has also become paramount to understand the consolidation process of these assets for better strategizing as it is not a negligible question that how the most valuable assets of modern societies become distributed. The industry transition from the establishment to a growth phase and then to maturity does not happen by itself, but it is the strategic actions of the industry-participating companies that drive the change (Maksimovic and Phillips, 2008). It has become evident that currently distributed industry assets will be concentrated due to the cyclic and oligopolistic nature of the telecommunications industry (M'Chirgui, 2006; Noam, 2006).

Based on the literature review, this research sets out a proposition as follows. An acquiring company can improve its long-term capability to consolidate industry assets by strategically balancing its corporate legitimacy, developing right-on-time resources, striving towards alignment in strategies of the stakeholders and utilizing learnings from past events.

4.1 Social legitimacy

In acquiring social legitimacy, the case companies executed actions in two distinct categories. First, the company built a certain level of legitimacy on the market for customer adoption. Companies used the corporate political activity to influence policy-making and they launched campaigns for brand-building purposes and to promote novel business ideas to potential customers and acquisition targets. Among the objectives of these external activities was to ensure legitimacy in the market, which supported the availability not only of potential customers for organic growth, but also of regulatory regimes and acquisition opportunities for inorganic growth.

4.2 Strategic alignment

The case companies had to possess alignment between the company strategies and its owners' preferences. While the company prepared its strategic plans and set its strategic visions, its owners considered the identified business opportunity in terms of timing and return-on-investment. These views were accommodated and integrated through formal discursive practices leading to eventual strategic alignment. In practice, events such as annual general meetings, and meetings of the board of directors or senior managers served as a proxy for this practice.

The need for strategy formulation varied at different stages of development. In its early life, the companies needed to pursue its strategic vision work more actively, given that the markets were not yet well-known and knowledge has not yet accumulated. As the understanding of the aspects deepened, major changes in strategy became less frequent and less dramatic. Desired market positions, selected business areas and geographics, and business logics developed over the iterations, whereas uncertainty diminished. On the other hand, the companies also found out what competences and resources they need to develop, and what practices its competitors are using.

The companies and its owners had different views about the pace and directions of the development at times. Collaboration with the owners gave the company strategic guidance and did help it to communicate its vision. These views gradually converged, and the consensus was finally reached. This, in turn, created congruence between the firm and its owners and gave the company the independence to pursue strategic actions without needing to report every operational issue. Through these activities, the company managed to define and agree on the positioning of growth.

4.3 Resource fulfillment

The resource fulfillment phase comprised two major activities. First, the companies arranged the most feasible funding for the up-coming acquisition and the increasing need for working capital. Second, they built the required core competences and accumulated resources to facilitate the integration.

Although the objective of seeking funding was generally the same over the company's life-span, the source varied. The need to establish contact with different stakeholders in capital markets was more pressing in the establishment phase than in the major growth phase. For example, venture-capital firms or venture funds provided initial growth funding in exchange for equity and without tangible security. Funding was sought in a series of public offerings in the early growth phase, whereas loans were typically taken in the phase of majority growth when the company had assets that could guarantee debts. In all these phases, the companies needed the right social network with access to capital markets and negotiation processes. Thus, seeking funding was about finding the right financing partner and selling the business idea to it.

This was also the phase in which the company built the core competencies that enabled it to acquire and integrate. In practice, activities such as prospect research, acquisition negotiations and due-diligence checks were crucial steps in assessing and evaluating acquisition targets. Although the company sought a dominant position in the market, it needed to be critical and selective in its acquisitions to ensure positive business results. Another set of competences was related to integration. The desired level of integration varied firm by firm, but basic levels of governance and cross-subsidiary synergy were typically pursued in all acquisitions. These activities required managers to be capable of extracting, executing and reporting necessary changes in organizational structures and practices and then communicating the information to the organization. Different regulatory authorities also mandated specific post-integration practices in certain regions for regulatory reasons and some of the competencies related to practices within a new regulatory authority or a new cultural area. This phase of acquiring resources resulted in the development of capabilities related to acquisition and integration.

4.4 Consolidation pursuit

The objective in the consolidation-pursuit phase was to expand the strategic business areas to increase the scale and obtain a bigger market share. The first major step for the companies was to conduct research on prospective businesses that could be acquisition targets with a good strategic fit and a significant assets base. In line with its strategic choices, the company critically evaluated different opportunities and then proceeded with the most feasible. The company managers examined the business of its acquisition targets as thoroughly as possible to identify any risks and realistic synergies and ensure that the transaction would fit its portfolio. Candidate selection was based on the choices made in the strategic-alignment phase, related to aspects such as geographical area or product offering. Acquisition targets were then selected from existing or new areas.

If the strategic focus areas changed in the strategic alignment phase, it was justified to divest some of the existing businesses at times. Included in the rationale behind possible divestment was the need to improve operational efficiency in the case of certain business areas that do not provide the required economies of scale: a split was supposed to sharpen the focus on operations by removing some of the ancillary offerings and to free capital to allow other expansion activities. During or after these divestments, the company started looking for candidates from a novel business area.

When a transaction with the acquisition target was completed, the companies still needed to merge their operations to ensure proper corporate governance and the retention of extant businesses. Thus, the expanded business or offering was the output of this phase.

4.5 Merger

The core process comprised four pre-integration phases ranging from social legitimacy to consolidation pursuit phase. However, there was yet another phase that was critical − the merging of the acquired business and assets. There were potential synergies if the acquired business was integrated into the existing enterprise structures. These integration activities included the merging of assets, the transitioning of processes toward adopting common methods, organizational consolidation and, most importantly, the introduction of composite management practices. In carrying out these activities, the companies sought to realize synergies through economies of scale, meaning decreased operational costs, more efficient processes and the leveraging of joint complementary assets. In addition, the companies sought to realize synergies through scale-free assets, meaning process and business innovations, social networks and intellectual property rights. Complementing these internal synergies, some of the companies also realized market synergies by providing added value to the joint customer base through a wider offering or a more extensive geographical reach.

4.6 Learning loop

The learning loop completed the acquisition program in terms of providing feedback on lessons learned from end to beginning. Potential feedback information included the impact of the realized acquisition on existing markets, how regulatory authorities saw the company and any change in a public image due to the acquisition. Furthermore, in some cases, internal stakeholders had changed their perceptions if the acquisition was somehow different than previous ones: this is why all lessons learned from previous acquisitions were evaluated critically and possible changes were identified. This “rearview-mirror” practice had an impact on the practicalities of the acquisition process or stakeholders involved.

Finally, the cycle of the acquisition program reached its end, and repeating iterations continued to provide companies with consolidation opportunities, thereby moving the company in the direction of strategic vision. However, no company or industry was able to grow infinitely and all companies were forced to start seeking adjacent markets for continued growth.

5.1 The firm-level process: consolidation management

Our main goal was to build an acquisition program model of how a firm could manage its business acquisitions to become a dominant player in the market by consolidating industry assets. As we found in our case study, American Tower, Crowne Castle and SBA Communications all succeeded in reaching a dominant position by acquiring mobile communications towers, fiber cables, cell-sites and small-cell infrastructure. They did so through their acquisition programs by strategically collaborating with other external stakeholders to legitimize the social image of the company and the emerging market, by identifying and agreeing with owners on the spatial-temporal dimensions of the strategy, by building up the required competencies and access to capital markets and finally by acquiring the selected targets and their telecommunications tower assets. Thus, our model differs from others with respect to the activities needed to carry out successful acquisition strategies.

We perceive two major ways in which our model differs from those in existing studies, and which we suggest as the core of successful consolidation. First, it emphasizes the pre-acquisition phases of the consolidation, whereas existing literature tends to assess success in terms of post-acquisition integration activities. More specifically, our model implies that consolidation requires an organization to engage in strategic activities that ensure alignment between stakeholders in the environment and in the company. It is especially pertinent in the establishment and growth phases of the industry. Pre-acquisition work related to legitimacy, strategy and resource accumulation reduces post-acquisition risk, ensures a strategic fit and improves the probability of success. Separate bodies of extant literature support our findings (e.g. Al-Laham et al., 2010; Chalençon et al., 2017; Morosini et al., 1998; Rabier, 2017; Song et al., 2021; van Kranenburg and Voinea, 2017; Öberg and Holström, 2006). In addition, such pre-acquisition work could be seen as a learning process that enables an organization to adapt to ever-changing environmental circumstances. Over the years, technologies and best practices tend to change and the company must be able to adopt these novel aspects in the evolution.

Second, our model takes an active stand on the deemed inevitability of stagnation in the mature phase of industry evolution. A telecommunications infrastructure company that anticipates the industry is able to steer its strategic course toward new products or geographical areas and thereby overcome single-market constraints (Lin et al., 2020). In addition, acquiring a business from adjacent offering areas may open up a new opportunity space faster than building capabilities in-house (Lee et al., 2017; Lee and Lieberman, 2010). This strategic shift not only requires an organizational commitment and compliance (Madsen and Waldorff, 2019; Whalley and Curwen, 2017), but also a capability to learn and unlearn throughout the evolution. Or as the organization scholars define it, the company should hold an organizational ambidexterity (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2011). For example, CCI expanded its business from mobile towers to fiber networks, and SBA expanded its business from mobile towers to data center premises.

Considered a theoretical construct, industry asset consolidation could be described as a latent force that gradually reduces the number of companies in the industry and shifts the power from the many to the few. However, from the firm-level strategy perspective, it is necessary to change our proposition thus: industry asset consolidation is an exogenous latent force that does not constraint a firm otherwise than to grow until opportunities cease to exist and stagnation occurs. To put it simply: if you don't buy those assets, someone else does. On the basis of our findings, we argue that companies without the ability to adapt to industry-asset consolidation forces experience industry consolidation as disruptive (Lähteenmäki et al., 2017) and are forced to exit or to merge with others. Hence, a company operating in a consolidating market needs to understand the part of the industry logic that forces companies to acquire each other.

5.2 Company evolution as part of the industry's life cycle

We found in our analysis that the evolution phases of a company and the industry's life-cycle are interrelated. If the industry has already matured and a major growth era is coming to an end, it is challenging for a new entrant to enter the market and pursue major growth strategies. Hence, if a company wishes to consolidate industry assets, it needs to be on the market before major consolidation takes place. As shown in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 1, we divided the evolution of the case market into three phases. There is no clear doming design in the establishment phase, and already dominant companies consolidate the market in the major growth phase. Hence, we argue that the optimal time to enter the market is during the late establishment era, but before the early-growth phase starts. This window of entry opportunity not only influences how the firm performs (Suarez et al., 2015), but it also suggests that the prior acquired experience in a local market improves the survival rate of an entrant (Tschoegl, 2002). This prerequisite supports the use of alliances and joint-ventures for market entry. However, as also proposed by Long and Miao (2020), the market entry may also vary based on the product the company provides, as there may be markets for multiple qualities for different customer segments. Based on these views, it can be argued that an acquisition program should be implemented in the acquiring firm by the market entry time.

5.3 Boundary conditions

Although our study revealed a latent acquisition program process of the industry-asset consolidation within the selected case companies in the telecommunications infrastructure market, we should also consider the possibility that the companies were unique in their position which could limit the transferability of the model to different contexts. Due, in part, to the historical perspective and the restriction to a single country, it could be argued that our study features a timing issue that gave a wider range of timely opportunities to the case companies than, let us say, to an industry or a country that is emerging nowadays. However, we believe that this does not take into account the cyclic nature of any industry or the constant technological evolution: these aspects have opened up growth opportunities historically (Fuentelsaz et al., 2015) and are likely to do so in the future.

We identify two specific boundary conditions in our model. First, although the theoretical model includes factors that seek to influence markets, the framework is inherently rooted in one individual company and it also depicts the process from the perspective of a single company. Whether or not the company's performance is better than that of its competitors, or better than the industry average, is a relevant question, but our model can only suggest that companies with an acquisition program may have a better-than-average survival rate.

Second, we analyzed all the case companies from the establishment phase until the maturity phase. Our model does not address the ambivalence of situations such as if a company is already established in one market and then pursues a major strategic shift towards another industry (Meglio et al., 2015) and how its renewal occurs. According to our model, this new venture starts from the establishment phase and then progresses. However, in this case, the establishment phase might be funded by the parent company.

5.4 Limitations and future research opportunities

We acknowledge that our model has some implicit constraints, which provide opportunities for further research. The constructed theoretical dimensions represent strategic activities that acquiring telecommunications infrastructure companies need to carry out, but how the strategic vision is formulated in practice, for example, is beyond the scope of our study: there is the potential for managerial contributions in this area in particular. Moreover, we did not cover any aspects of corporate political activity (e.g. lobbying), nor did we seek any unethical signs. All the case companies currently have a code of conduct in place, but what happened in their early days remains open. Furthermore, given that we only studied companies that leveraged their publicly-listed-company status on their evolution path, whether or not the ownership structure influenced the growth process remains an open question. Although the studied companies were global, they all operated through a US-based headquarters, hence future research could replicate this study for non-US-based companies.

Because our study is based on qualitative methods, the results do not provide any evidence through quantitative and statistical means. Mathematical modeling or statistical testing of the proposition may bring further support for the results, which opens an opportunity for future research.

The infrastructure utilized in the case companies was designed for generic public telecommunication services, hence we do not know if different types of infrastructure would influence the process. Several governments have separated the critical infrastructure for national security into distinct units, and this market may not necessarily consolidate as easily. These special-purpose cases open up opportunities for further research, given that such markets are highly special.