Welcome, everyone, to the final course of our financial specialization that is devoted to mergers and acquisitions. This is sort of the peak of corporate strategy. This is the area that is widely known for unthinkable amounts of money that are in this area for some fairy tales and miracles that happen. This is the area that attracts a lot of moviemakers. That really sort of is very much thrilling, and at same time, seems to be completely out of reach of the people at large. And the question arises, why study it? If all of those huge guys deal with that, why do we care? Well, we'll be answering this question throughout this course. But already now we can say a very important thing, that fortunately or unfortunately, but we oftentimes ourselves are also affected by these transactions. Sometimes in a very distant and indirect way, sometimes in a much more direct way. Now the key conflict that arises here, the key threshold, the breakdown of two conflicting views is the following. If we look at the M&A market, it's like whether it's good or bad, but this good or bad takes a special form here. Some people, and there's quite a few of them, think that this market is a field day for speculators. So basically, these people believe that we are not talking about anything positive, progressive, about value creation, or whatever. This is just some uncharted waters that big people, they fight with each other, and they make fortunes. On the other way, there is the sort of more positive view that says that this is the logical, Outgrowth of competitive forces. So basically, here the people say, this is a great thing. So if for any reason, one company, let's say, is lagging behind its competitors and cannot succeed, then some people may take it over, let's say buy it and then turn it around, and then the company will be doing better. Now this conflict is widely studied and widely discussed. And we will be discussing that as well. But throughout the specialization, we have been talking about the key idea of finance, the idea of value and value creation. Now here, we're coming at the final stage of our discussion, and we see that here a value creation is also a very important thing. Now oftentimes people claim that through these transactions, when one company buys another company, or they just merge and become another entity, then a lot of value's being created. But we can ask a big question. Who benefits from this value creation? Who pockets this value? And this is not such a trivial question. And here we come to one of the ideas about them, and these they say, well, these transactions, oftentimes people enjoy a win-win situation. And even more so, we observe the phenomena that is called synergy. Synergy of this is a huge term that sometimes becomes a buzzword in this area. And these things, they say, well, there's so much value created, and so that is pocketed by everyone. So we don't have to worry about that. Unfortunately, this approach is just wishful thinking. And we cannot afford to ignore the question of who benefits. And that logically brings us to the fundamental framework that we'll be using throughout this course. And this framework is, actually, very useful even beyond the scope of this work. That is called the stakeholder approach. We will see in what follows that it's really important to identify certain groups of people or certain individuals who play important roles in the transaction and the post-transaction integration. And it crucially depends upon the motives and the actions of these people, when the transaction does result in value creation. Or on the contrary, results in value destruction. So starting from next episode, we will talk about stakeholder's approach.