No business day ends without news on a merger or an acquisition and most managers have experience of acquisitions and/or mergers. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), that is, the acquisition of (the majority of) the shares in a target company or the legal unification of two organizations into one, are recurrent phenomena in business life (Cartwright and Schoenberg, 2006; Meglio and Risberg, 2010) appearing in waves (Martynova and Renneboog 2008; Shleifer and Vishny 1991). M&A not only result in changed shareholder value, but also in changed industry structures, reconsidered competitive landscapes, and form new key players in markets (Chandler, 1962; Cox, 2006; Finkelstein, 1997).

Stakeholder research (e.g., Parmar, Freeman, Harrison, Wicks, Prnell and de Colle, 2010; Rowley, 1997) emphasizes the multi-actor, multi-interest perspective to strategic decisions. A value chain perspective on firms suggests customers and suppliers as important stakeholders of firms (e. g., Normann and Ramirez, 1993) and indicates that customers and suppliers may actually act vis-à-vis an M&A. But the picture of customers and suppliers as tradable assets or potential beneficiaries from the acquirer’s point of view seems to dominate. In this paper we particularly address the stake at stake for customers and suppliers in M&A. The following questions are asked:

 To what extent are customers and suppliers acknowledged in the M&A literature?

 How are customer and supplier stakes in M&A described?