In the contemporary economic environment, each company that succeeds in creating and offering value to its clients/consumers will be able to survive in the market and even record profit for the medium and long timethus value represents a driving force for a sustainable business model. Considering the significant role of perceived value within strategic management, the main purpose of this research is to identify and test an adequate conceptual frame in order to study the value concept and its connections with satisfaction, loyalty and perceived risk in order to offer a proper management tool for monitoring the sustainability of an existing business. So, this study proposed and tested concepts in the context of the S.M.E. market in Romania. Results show that both risk and value play a significant role in influencing satisfaction and customer loyalty, thus, in the end, company bottom line. ARTICLE HISTORYare individuals in this study, we will refer to both enterprises and individuals without taking into consideration the differences between them. Some remarks on enterprises' acquisition process need to be pointed out: decision-makers from the acquisition department are usually involved in the purchase decision, along with other departments such as finance, production, etc.; therefore more people are involved in the supplier selection process, enterprises deal with budget constraints, and consultations between requirements, budget, and acquisition processes take place in order to improve the acquisition process.Many companies recognise the significant role of perceived value within strategic management (Spiteri and Dion, 2004). Slater (1997) stated that the existence of a successful company is driven by its own capacity to create and to offer real value for consumers.Following this idea, increasing value for consumers became a strategic point for companies to develop and maintain a competitive advantage. Both loyalty and the company's profitability are strongly related to the process of the creation and delivery of customer value. Customer value, defined by Woodruff as 'a customer perceived preference for and evaluation of those products attributes, attribute performances, and consequences arising from use that facilitate (or block) achieving the customer's goals and purposes in use situations', is considered to be 'a crucial strategic factor in gaining a competitive advantage' (Mele, 2007). We can assert that the consumers' increasing value plays a critical role in companies' strategies in the context of an increasingly competitive environment. In this context both loyalty and the company's profitability are strongly related to the process of the creation and delivery of customer value. The main purpose of our research is to identify and test an adequate conceptual frame in order to study the concept of value, and also the connections between value and other concepts such as satisfaction, loyalty and perceived risk. This study is conducted on the Romanian small to medium enterprise (S.M.E.) market, and the obtained...

RECENT TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS Sorin Adrian Achim

No abstract

Since SMEs are the most important entities of the national economy we can say that their performance is the locomotive of performance at the microeconomic level. The present material is not limited to measuring the performance of SMEs in Romania for a given period, but aims to analyze what impact did the European integration of Romania had on the performance of SME within the development regions. For this we took from the annual edition of White Paper of SMEs for the period 2004-2011 the values of eight indicators used to quantified performance (net result, turnover, return on equity, commercial rate, rotation rate of own capital, overall autonomy rate, labor productivity and overall solvency ratio), we explained the choice of these indicators, we applied the model of unobserved components and established a global performance index of SME development for each region separately. With this index we could determine whether Romania's EU accession had an influence on the performance of SME development in the regions and we could compare this influence with the influences of economic crisis manifested in the analyzed period on the same performance indicators.

No abstract