Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have gained prominence across the globe as a way of gaining competitive advantage and boosting the profit of the companies. The Indian pharmaceutical industry has readily embraced M&As in the recent times and has witnessed a number of profitable deals materialize, while some indeed failed. The success of M&As is contingent upon a variety of factors and eventually has a bearing on how the acquiring and target companies perform. This study intended to identify the various factors that either lead to or impede M&As and to measure their impact on company performance. The factors that motivate and discourage M&As were identified and the importance of factors such as deal size and compulsory licensing requirement in M&A success was assessed and the impact of the all these factors on the performance of the companies was assessed using both primary and secondary data. The encouraging and discouraging aspects of M&A were found to impact company performance significantly, so did the deal size and compulsory licensing requirement. The findings implied that the success of M&As depends on a variety of positive and negative factors and the participating companies need to balance these factors judiciously in order to obtain realistic profits from M&As