Privatization of state-owned enterprises through asset sales

Abstract

Privatization program is regarded as one of increasingly important policy in which the state-agency decides to sell the public assets to private sectors for various reasons. The public assets being privatized are regarded as national-owned assets, belonging to individuals in the society where these assets should be handled in a maximizing manner to provide economic welfare for the country. With the importance of public enterprises established for economic-orientation purposes, the study aims to examine on whether privatization policies being conducted in a maximizing manner to the economy and society as a whole in terms of proceeds from state-owned asset sales by using bidder’s return at announcement period as a proxy. In an efficient theory, the assets should be sold at fair value creating no abnormal returns to the acquirer, however, the bidder’s return tends to be significant positive in this case. The sample is based on the total number of 1,832 state-owned enterprises acquisitions by public firms. The mean difference test suggests statistically significance in the abnormal returns to bidder during the announcement periods which are 1.06%, 1.03% and 2.01%, for the full sample, deal value disclose, and deal value not disclose for 5-day window, respectively. Furthermore, classifying the samples into different political system, industries type, corruption level, and bidder nation also allows for additional insights. With the significant statistics results, the study suggested that privatization activities through M&A may be underpinned by secretive or private incentives that led the price of assets sold to deviate from fair value whereby the acquirers enjoy the gains and sale proceeds are not maximized.