Expanding business through acquiring new customers can be challenging in the industries with high supplier switch barriers. In the attempt to increase reliability in the operation and maintain stable quality level companies tend to establish long-term, value-added cooperation. Strong relationship between a supplier and a customer significantly decreases companies’ agility. Nevertheless, a major organizational change, like a merger or an acquisition, in supplying company are able to destabilize strong partnership, that has been built even through years of cooperation. 

The objective of this thesis is to explore business opportunities mergers and acquisitions represent for competitors in industries with high supplier switch barriers, and to create a tool for their proactive identification. Organizational changes not only affect a company in which they take place, but their consequences spread outside company’s boundaries and influence business partners. The stronger cooperation between companies, the bigger impact on partners a change will cause.  Although mergers and acquisitions are usually aimed at increasing value delivered to customers, practice shows that during post-merger stage customers often experience insecurity and disbelief in positive outcome, and exhibit resentment toward the change.

The outcomes of this study suggest that temporary customer dissatisfaction with current supplier and supplier’s inability to deliver previous value to customer that occur during mergers and acquisitions creates favourable environment for competitive responses. Although mergers and acquisitions happen comparatively infrequently, they can impact a group of potential customers at a time. For this reason, it is important that a company, which is going to use mergers and acquisitions in competitors as opportunities to get new customers, integrates it as a strategy and continuously woks on gaining competitive intelligence in order to be proactive and catch opportunities timely