Cultural integration is crucial to M&As

Despite rapid development over the past decade, China's overseas mergers and acquisitions are still in their early stage and face "great challenges", a commerce official said on Saturday at the China International Fair for Investment and Trade in Xiamen.

"Although cross-border mergers and acquisitions by Chinese companies made great progress in the past decade, there are many problems and great challenges," said Liu Yingjun, deputy director of the department of outward investment and economic cooperation at the Ministry of Commerce.

Mergers and acquisitions accounted for 36.4 percent of China's $27.2 billion in outbound direct investment in 2011, compared with 7.4 percent in 2002. The M&A share of outbound investment hit a high of 50.4 percent in 2008, according to the ministry.