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A merger is hard to pull off under any circumstances. It's harder when everybody is against you.

Every single time you make a merger, somebody is losing his identity. And saying something different is just rubbish.

This is certainly not the first case in which a merger approved in one place hasn't gone through in the other. There was a case last year where the merger between two EU companies was approved here and blocked in the U.S.

Mergers generate substantial synergies.

You're doing a major merger, you got to hope you didn't get it wrong. That's the view of any CEO.

Reasonable mergers generate substantial synergies, so that provides for earnings and cash-flow growth even if it doesn't provide for revenue growth, and I think that's a big driver.

In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.

Well, you would have to say what is the criteria to determine the success of any merger? It would have to be that the companies are stronger financially, that they took market share, and they are on a very steady footing in terms of their performance.

When you love competition, you don't want the market to consolidate.

Today's merger makers are not ad people; they're building communications companies.