Passage 1
John T. Chambers, Chief Executive of Cisco Systems, talks about the merger of Cisco with a larger company:
A merger of equals had a lot of appeal. If you combine the Number 1 and Number 2 players in an industry, by definition you’re Number 1 in terms of size. By combining two companies with good management teams, you automatically build up the strength of your management. You can also widen your customer base and have more distribution channels.
In addition, the merger automatically makes your remaining competition second level. As a result, your competition must rethink its strategy. In the end, you force a period of mergers and acquisitions on your competition.
When we looked more closely, our concerns were raised. For example, 50 percent of large-scale mergers fail. Mergers can fail on a number of levels. They can fail in terms of their benefit to the shareholders, customers, employees and business partners. A decision has to be right with each of those groups, or we would not go forward with it.
If you merge two companies that are growing at 80 percent rates, you stand a very good chance of stopping both of them. That’s a fact. For a period of time, no matter how smoothly they operate, you lose momentum.
Our industry is not like the banking industry, where you are acquiring branch banks and customers. In our industry, you are acquiring people. And if you don’t keep those people, you have made a terrible, terrible investment. We pay between $500,000 and $2 million per person in an acqusition. So you can understand that if you don’t keep the people, you’ve done a tremendous disservice to your shareholders. So we focus first on the people and how we incorporate them into our company, and then we focus on how to drive the business.
44.In order to compete with other companies, Cisco is forced to go into the next round of mergers.
A、True
B、False
【正确答案】：B
【名师解析】:根据文章内容，John T. Chambers 讨论了并购的优点和潜在问题。他指出，合并两个行业领导者确实可以立即成为行业第一，并且可以增强管理团队、扩大客户基础和分销渠道。此外，这样的合并还能迫使竞争对手重新考虑他们的策略。然而，他也提到了合并可能失败的风险，特别是在对股东、客户、员工和商业伙伴的好处方面。他还强调了在他们的行业中，收购的是人才，如果收购后不能留住这些人，那么对股东来说就是一个巨大的损失。因此，他们首先关注如何将人才整合进公司，然后才是业务发展。
题目中的说法是 "In order to compete with other companies, Cisco is forced to go into the next round of mergers." 这与文章内容不符。文章中并没有提到思科被迫进行下一轮的合并，而是讨论了合并的潜在风险和他们对人才的重视。因此，正确答案是选项B.False。
