Having been minimally involved with acquisitions while working for a fortune 500 company I can say that we did very poorly. Most of the financial benifits of our acquisitions seemed to be "Good Will", seldom converted to big $$.

After struggling with our acquisitions for awhile we frequently sold them for a loss. Most of our acquisitions overtime disolved into nothing, without ever providing a positive return.

Small companies making acquisitions may have advantages over large companies, especially when the target is a smaller company -it's less likely they'll drown the smaller acquired company.