Roll-Up Merger

See: Roll Up.

A roll-up is really more of a series of acquisitions than a merger. Acquisition = Buying Stuff (usually with cash, but sometimes with stock).

So now think about buying things, or rolling them up, where the targets are about the same size as the acquiror. That's where the notion of a roll-up merger comes in. You're kind of buying, kind of merging a series of companies together for some logical reason.

Like...if you could buy all the hotels in a given 40-mile strip of highway, and then raise prices on all of them 20% (and not get regulated), you could take profit margins and revenues up so much that it'll have been worth the various frictions you undertook in buying the various targets you hit. You'll have diluted yourself in issuing stock for some of the purchases, but at least notionally, the "one plus one" event of this roll-up merger will have been way more than two.

See: Synergy (albeit skeptically).