 There are three forms of acquisitions. The first is the merger or consolidation. Second is the acquisition of stock. And third is the acquisition of assets. Let's see how these three forms work. Merger or consolidation. This refers to the absorption of one firm by another. In merger deals, the acquirer retains its name and entity, both. It gets all assets and accepts all liabilities of the inquiry, whereas the inquiry's entity ceases to exist and vanishes from the world. In consolidation, it refers to the setting up of a new firm with the absorption of two or more firms. In consolidation, the legal existence of acquirer and the inquiry ceases to exist. It is terminated. The example of merger can be A acquires B giving B's honors one share of A's stock for two shares of B. So this is how the mergers of A and B will take place. In this particular example of merger, legally B's shares ceases to exist. In consolidation, A and B exchange their shares for the shares of a new firm C. The second form of acquisition is the acquisition of stock. This refers to the buying of a firm's voting stock in exchange for cash, shares, or any other form of securities. In this form of acquisition, a private offer is made by a firm's management to the management of another firm. This offer may be taken directly to the target firm's stockholders in the form of a tender offer and this tender offer is given through a public announcement. The target firm's management and board of directors are bypassed in this tender offer. Some unwilling shareholders may be there in the target firm that may not tender their shares of the firm's stock in response to the tender offer given to those shareholders. So holding out by a minority of shareholders like this particular class of shares, these shareholders may prevent complete absorption. The third form of acquisition is the acquisition of assets. In this form of acquisition, a firm is acquired through the acquisition of all of its assets. The target firm may retain its legal entity in this particular form of acquisition. The advantage in this form of acquisition is that the minority shareholders may not cause any problem for the acquirer. There is a disadvantage in this form of acquisition too and that disadvantage is that the assets acquisition involves transferring the titles to the individual assets and this really cost to the acquirer in terms of huge amount. If we sum up the varieties of takeovers, we see that takeovers can take any of the three forms like acquisition, proxy contest and the going private whereas the acquisition have further three forms as we have studied like merger or consolidation, acquisition of stock and acquisition of assets. Classification of acquisitions, we can classify acquisitions in three formats like horizontal acquisition. This is the case where both the acquirer and the acquirer are in the same industry for example of floor mills, buyers and other floor mills so both are in the same industry. Second form of classification of acquisition is the critical acquisition. In this case, this involves firms at different steps of production process. For example, a tire manufacturer buys tire rubber manufacturer, conglomerate acquisition. This refers to the situation where acquirer and the acquired firm are unrelated to each other. For example, a banking firm buys an advertising firm, takeovers a form of acquisition. In this case, a firm gets control of another firm by having a majority of board awards on its board of directors. This means that in takeovers, a firm gets as many as number of shareholders in that in the other firms share capital so that this holding of share capital enables the buying firm to place its own persons or individuals as directors in the acquired firms board of directors. There are two priorities in a takeover. The first is the bidder. It is the firm who gets the control of the other firm. Second priority is the target firm. This is the firm whose control is taken over by the bidder. Consideration, it is the price in terms of cash or stock value against which the firm's control is undertaken by the bidder. Forms of takeover, it has three forms. The first is the acquisition. This acquisition takes place through mergers and offers of stock or assets buying of the target firm. Proxy contest, in this case the bidder attempts through voting seats on the target firm's board of directors. Going private, it refers to the situation where a small group of investors buys all equity shares of a public firm and gets its equity shares listed from the stock exchange and this listed company goes into a private company.