High-Profile Acquisition Failures: 2010–2020
Author : Anbac Advisors | Published On : 23 Oct 2026
Introduction – When Buying a Business Means Buying Its Problems
Every acquisition starts the same way: a confident announcement, a strategic rationale, and a number that makes investors sit up. The press release talks about synergies, market leadership, and transformational potential. What it doesn’t mention is what the acquiring company actually knows – or more often, what it doesn’t. The decade between 2010 and 2020 produced some of the most expensive due diligence failures in corporate history. Not because the buyers were careless or naive – many had armies of advisors and months of preparation. But somewhere between the data room and the signing dinner, the right questions either weren’t asked, weren’t answered honestly, or the answers were buried deep enough that nobody looked. The result, in every case, was the same: the acquirer inherited a problem it thought it was buying an asset.
Three cases from this period stand out – not just for the scale of the financial fallout, but for how clearly, in hindsight, the warning signs were there. HP and Autonomy. Daiichi Sankyo and Ranbaxy. Tata Motors and Tata Teleservices. Each tells a slightly different story about how acquisitions go wrong. Together, they demonstrate what happens when financial, regulatory, and strategic risks are not independently challenged before it is too late to change course.
Case 1 – Tata Teleservices (2017-2020): When the Exit Costs More Than the Entry
The Setup
Tata Teleservices was one of India’s mid-tier telecom operators, a subsidiary of Tata Sons. By 2016, it was already a business under severe financial pressure – Tata Sons had been infusing capital to fund its losses and debt repayments for years. Then in September 2016, Reliance Jio launched its services with free voice calls and heavily subsidised data. Analysts immediately warned that the move made survival for smaller telecom players “very difficult.” Tata Teleservices was among the most exposed.
In September 2017, Tata Group announced that Bharti Airtel would acquire Tata Teleservices’ consumer mobile telephony business. The deal was structured with no upfront cash payment to Tata – an immediate signal of how little bargaining power Tata had in a market it was effectively fleeing. At the time of the announcement, analysts warned that even with the deal, the exit could cost Tata Group $4-5 billion. That estimate, as it turned out, was an undercount.
What the Exit Actually Cost
To complete the transfer of the consumer mobile business to Bharti Airtel, Tata Group paid lenders and the government approximately ₹500 billion ($7.3 billion) in settlement of dues. The consumer mobile business formally became part of Bharti Airtel on 1 July 2019. But the financial damage didn’t stop there.
Between January 2014 and December 2019, Tata Sons had infused approximately ₹46,595 crore into Tata Teleservices to fund losses, debt repayments, and capital expenditure. By FY2020, Tata Teleservices reported a net loss of ₹13,225 crore and accumulated losses of ₹48,907 crore. And then came a further hit: the Supreme Court ordered Tata Teleservices to pay approximately ₹13,823 crore in Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) dues to the government. Tata Sons was forced to arrange ₹10,000 crore from banks and the rest from internal accruals to meet the deadline set by the court.
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