Another LCD cartel member fined
Last December we reported the multi-million dollar fines given to a cartel of LCD makers, including South Korea's LG Displays, Taiwan-based Chunghwa Picture Tube, and Japan-based Sharp. These companies were convicted of meeting to set prices on desktop computer, laptop and television screens. Worldwide market [...]
Evil Empire buys rival, quashes anticompetition suit
News Corp, through its News America Marketing unit, recently bought out competitor Floorgraphics for an undisclosed sum. Both companies are in the businesses of selling coupon inserts and in-store advertising.
The deal is to in itself remarkable or very big. But the interesting point is [...]
Cargill and food prices
We've written a lot about Cargill, the privately-held conglomerate that is key oligopoly worldwide food industry. It is constantly in the news. It has been recently declared Australia's leading whet exporter. It was the victim of partial takeover (of its rice operations) in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela,' [...]
Merck-Schering-Plough
The big news today is the acquisition of drugmaker Schering-Plough by Merck. While it's being called a merger in the press, it is clear that Merck comes out on top in terms of staffing and name. But curiously, it's being structured as a reverse takeover, where nominally Schering-Plough acquires Merck, [...]
The coming Kindle monopoly?
For a long time, selling books has been an oligopoly. On the brick-and-mortar world, it is Wal-Mart, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. In the digital world, there's Amazon, which dwarfs any competitors.
These four have driven all but a handful of small chains and independent [...]
Stacking oligopolies
The proposed merger of Live Nation and TicketMaster is a clear case of two oligopolies stacking on one another to extend their near-monopoly control vertically.
Live Nation either owns of has the right to book nearly every major pop music venue in the US (71 at lest count), [...]
Erectile oligopoly accused of cartel
Swiss antitrust officials have charged the three leading makers of erectile dysfunctional drugs of a price-fixing cartel. The three are Bayer (Levitra), Pfizer (Viagra), and Eli Lilly (Cialis). According to the Swiss officials, the three companies set and enforced similar "recommended prices" for their drug [...]
Stupidest deals: Fiat-Chrysler
With few mergers and acquisitions taking place now, and a growing number falling apart, we will start looking at the deals over the last few years that have turned out to be disasters. Not for executives, consultants, private equity groups, and bankers - they've (mostly) managed to get' [...]
Getting hosed
The EU competition commission recently fined a cartel of marine hose manufacturers for price fixing. Marine hose is a rubberized pipe used to transfer oil between storage facilities and oil tankers and offshore platforms. The main customers are oil companies. The companies involved had met secretly to set prices [...]
Pfizer to buy Wyeth
Well, the deal came through and finally moved at lightning speed. Wyeth has agreed to be acquired by Pfizer, making the #1 drug company even large in scope. The cost was an amazing $68 billion in cash and stock, a very rich deal for this credit-starved time. [...]
Head-scratcher
Big UK banks seem to be in just as bad shape as their American cousins. The government is about to start a second round of bailouts (Of up to $100 billion) and the targets are rumored to be the three biggest: Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, and Barclays.
RBS [...]
The dark night of Citigroup and Bank of America
How the might have fallen! Citigroup and BoA had pushed to dominate financial services by buying up rivals and expanding horizontally. Over the last few years, they have bought into areas from stock brokering, investment banking, wealth management, credit cards, and so [...]
Broken China
In December 2004 we reported
Ireland-based Waterford Wedgwood the world's leader maker of fine china and crystal announced it will buy competitor Royal Doulton, based in the UK. These leaders in the luxury tableware market have both been suffering due to the shrinkage of the dollar, a major [...]
Panasonic buys Sanyo
Mergers between Japanese consumer electronics giants have been few and far between, even though you would think hat these companies would want to reduce competition by buying out rivals. These wide-ranging companies (including Hirtachi, Canon, Konica Minolta, Epson, Sony, and many others) have long pursued parallel lines of [...]
LCD price fixers "sorry"
Three giants of the LCD (liquid crystal display) industry will soon plead guilty to price fixing, Korean-based LG Display Co. will pay $400 million, Taiwan-based Chunghwa Picture Tubes $65 million, and Japan-based Sharp $120 million.
A Bloomberg News article (LG Display, Sharp Shares Fall on Price-Fixing [...]
More medical deals
While the current crisis has put an end to deals in many areas, there are still some areas where the chance of bargains and a belief in the long range have allowed the pace of acquisitions I to keep on track. The health area is a key one.
In [...]
Brands and the (incredible shrinking) Big Three
"Just how serious are they about shrinking their vast lineups of different brands and models to match the current harsh reality of the market?" That’s the key question asked in the New York Times t "Big Three May Need to Trim Number of Brands," [...]
Wherein my taxes fund Citigroup's new acquisition
First was the knowledge that Citigroup was in a bad way thanks to bad loans and credit cards. Then Citigroup tried to buy rival Wachovia, but was beaten out by Wells Fargo. Then came a new bailout of Citigroup by the US government, in [...]
Brazilian bank deals
The Brazilian banking business has seen two large acquisitions over the last few weeks.Banco do Brasil, a state-owned bank, announced a deal to buy majority share in Nossa Caixa. The deal is for around $2.25 billion. The new bank will be #2 in Brazil.
Three weeks ago, an even [...]
DHL expresses itself out of US market
We've called it often before. In a three-company oligopoly (a triopoly?), the #3 company is always at risk. That's especially true when #1 and #2 keep the pressure on, and where there is no earth-shattering innovation that offers #3 a way to restructure the market.
When [...]
Limping along
This is in the way of an explanation and an apology. An apology to regular readers of Oligopoly Watch for my inattention in recent weeks and an explanation of why I have managed to avoid updating during some of the most turbulent and interesting world markets ever.
First, the simple [...]
Banks to use bailout money for more acquisitions
The idea of the bailout spreading of government largesse to banks was to get them making loans. But according to a news item from MSNBC News, at least some of the banks are planning on using the money to buy other [...]
Delta (finally) acquires Northwest
It took seemingly forever (actually some six months), but Delta Airlines finally got the antitrust authorities to pass on its acquisition of rival Northwest Airlines. The all-stock deal (worth $2.8 billion) creates the world's largest airline, with $35 billion in annual revenues and 75,000 employees. It [...]
Broken deals
While certain high-profile banking deals have been confirmed (Wells Fargo's bid for Wachovia has passed federal approval), in other fields the deals seem to collapsing. The New York Times Dealbook section ("A Day of Broken Deals," 10/13/08) spots this trend.
Among the almost-concluded acquisitions that have fallen on hard [...]
Wells Fargo: New King of the Hill?
Last Monday, it looked for sure that Citigroup had managed the deal of the century. Buying Wachovia at a dirt cheap price of around $1 a share, and arranging that the FDIC would make much of the uncollectible mortgage debt disappear at taxpayer [...]
Another one bites the dust
This time, as we noted yesterday, it's Wachovia Bank, the #3 bank in the US in terms of deposits. This time the buyer was Citigroup, and the price was $2.6 billion in stock. Like the other recent buyouts, this is a panic price, one [...]
JP Morgan'a turn
The current financial crisis seems to be a great opportunity for those who have cash and the ability to make a snap decision, that is, the ones that didn't get stuck holding too much bad paper/ As we pointed out before, Bank of America managed to acquire [...]
Bank of America - too enormous to fail
The recent bid to acquire of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America is just the latest step in a vast expansion of what was once NationalBank, a North Carolina regional bank that acquired California-based Bank of America in the 1889s. . It also is a [...]
The deal of the century?
No, not that one. We'll get to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch deal when the dust has settled.
The one that has us going is Best Buy's acquisition of Napster. Why did the #1 US electronics retailer see a need for buying the (now legalized) [...]
De-verticalization in the energy industry
A recent New York Times Dealbook article ("A Big Year for Small Energy Deals", 9/5/08) notes that "it appears that while the total volume of energy deals is down so far this year, the number of energy-related deals is up significantly." In other words, the money [...]
Altria goes smokeless
No, the maker of Marlboros and the #1 world cigarette maker has not stopped selling tobacco. Rather, it has acquired the #1 US smokeless tobacco company UST (US Tobacco). UST is the maker of Skoal and Copenhagen smokeless tobacco (snuff). The deal is estimated at $11/3 billion, [...]
Pharma: Another Japanese buyer, another US seller
Japanese pharmaceuticals company Shionogi announced that it has agreed to buy US-based drug company Sciele Pharma. The deal is for $1.4 billion in cash.
Shionogi, whose biggest drug Crestor, a cholesterol-lowering drug, was looking to get a better sales and marketing position in the [...]
The empire strikes back
Quite remarkable in the last week were the announced takeover of two UK firms by two Indian firms. It's all part of a growing trend of Indian companies to buy pieces of the British economy, once India's imperisl master.
First, Indian IT consulting giant Infosys announced it would [...]
Copier deal: Ricoh to buy IKON
Ricoh, the Japanese copier company (one of the top three in the world) announced it would buy IKON Office Solution. IKON is the leading independent office-machine dealer in the US with around 400 branches. Announced price of the deal is around $1,6 billion.
IKON already [...]
Severstal once again
The US may huff and puff about the Russian invasion of Georgia, but in the end the dollar (or rather the ruble) talks. Severstal, which is Russia's #1 steel company and the #4 steelmaker in the US, announced it would buy US coal company PBS for $1.3 billion. [...]
Japanese banks buys out US bank
It's yet another case of Japanese financial units buying abroad , and again a case of undervalued US assets looking like a good bargain, Mitsubishi UFJ Group, one of Japan's biggest banks, bought out the remaining assets of US-based Union Bank of California. The deal is [...]
CVS keeps consolidating in the retail drug industry
CVS Caremark, the US #2 retail pharmacy chain, has struck again, this time buying Longs Drug Stores Corp. for $2.9 billion, including debt. Longs is a serious player in the US West and would make CVS #1 in the lucrative California [...]
Sony buys out Bertelsmann’s music share
Sony announced that it has come terms with German media company Bertelsmann to buy out that company’s share of the world’s #2 music recording company, Sony BMG. The deal, for Bertelsmann’s 50% holding in the company, is for $1.2 billion. The new company will be [...]
Unilever washes out US laundry products biz
Anglo-Dutch personal and home care giant Unilever announced it would sell its US detergent and laundry products business to equity company Vestar Capital Partners. The price is $1.45. The brands involve include such standbys as All. Surf, Snuggle, and Wisk.
The move is [...]
Drug oligopoly windfall
According to a report from Democratic congressional staff for the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the US Congress, major drugmakers received a $3.7 windfall over the past two years, thanks to the way that their lobbyists wrote the rules for Medicare reimbursement.
The bonanza comes from [...]
America for sale: Insurance department
Here's yet another major acquisition of an American company from a foreign country. Tokio Marine Holdings, the #1 casualty insurance company in Japan, announced its deal to buy out US casualty insurer Philadelphia Consolidated Holding. The deal is for $4.7 billion in an all-cash deal. It [...]
UK grocery acquisition
The tight UK grocery market just got tighter. The Co-operative Group announced it will buy rival Sommerfield for $3.2 billion. The deal will add 900 stores in the current 2,200, all in the UK. It will also increase the new company's market share in the UK to 8%.
Co-op [...]
Israel's generics king strikes again
Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, the world's #1 generic drug maker, announced the purchase of a big competitor, US-based Barr Pharmaceuticals. The deal is for $7.5 billion in cash and stock.
Barr allows Teva to expand in the growing Eastern European market and also is a maker of [...]
Trash that waste deal!
We recently wrote about the planned deal between the #2 and #3 solid waste companies in the US. Republic Services (#3) agreed to acquire Allied Waste Industries (#2), in an attempt to gain traction on the #1 company, Waste Management. The three companies together have over [...]
Suez and Gaz de France finally come together
Just to show how slowly these things can go, the merger of French utility companies Suez and Gaz de France (GDF) was announced as likelihood two and a half years ago, in February 2006, as we reported. The deal finally got shareholder [...]
Biggest cash acquisition ever
InBev has pretty much nailed down its buyout of Anheuser-Busch, a move that will make it by far the biggest brewer in the world, with 17% worldwide market share and 49% US market share. The deal ends up at $52 billion. What's really amazing [...]
Another day, another chemical acquisition
Dow Chemical's announced acquisition of Rohm & Haas was followed quickly by an announced deal between two smaller, yet significant, US chemical companies. Ashland, the nation's largest chemical distributor and a major vendor of sealants, agreed to buy Hercules> the deal, including debt, is [...]
Dow to buy Rohm & Haas
US-based Dow Chemical, the #2 US chemical company, announced it would buy US-based Rohm & Hass in a deal worth $19.7 billion, including assumed debt. It was Dow's biggest acquisition. Rohm & Haas specializes in chemical s used in electronics (such as those used [...]
GE: Not easy being a conglomerate
General Electric has long been the counter-example. Whereas most other large companies have tried to specialize in adjacent areas and have gotten away from conglomerate status, GE has thrived on managing a wide variety of businesses, from light bulbs to jet engines to TV [...]
Weather Channel bought
Cable TV, which once promised to be this multiplicity of independent voices, has dwindled down to a half dozen owners, mostly the usual media suspects: Disney/ABC, GE.NBC, Viacom, Time-Warner, Comcast, News Corp. So it's significant when one of the few generally distributed basic cable channels gets bought [...]
Odds and ends
Some notes and follow-ups on recent deals or non-deals.
1. Blockbuster finally gave up on its crazy idea to buy Circuit City - which we laughed at here.
2. Discover Financial Services, owner of the Discover card, completed its purchase of Diners Card International from Citigroup. The [...]
South Korean company now canned tuna king
South Korean food company Dongwon announced it would acquire the StarKist canned tuna company from Del Monte Foods,
The deal is for $363 million. Dongwon is already dominant in canned tuna in Korean, with a 75% market share. It also owns the world's [...]
Waste deal aims at market control
We've written earlier about the oligopoly in the highly corrupt solid waste industry. That oligopoly just got tighter.
Republic services, the #2 waste disposal company in the US announced the acquisition of Allied Waste Industries, the #3 player in that area in the US. The [...]
Severstal buys Esmark
Severstal, Russia's #1 steelmaker, has struck again in the US. It announced that its has won a bidding war to buy Esmark, a US steel products company in a $775 million deal. It beat out India-based Essar Steel. Esmark was willing to be bought out, thanks to difficulties [...]
Iron hand
Iron ore giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton announced that they had come to agreements with key Chinese steelmakers, agreements that hike the base price of iron ore by 86% over a year ago. The combination of ever increasing demand, especially from China and India, along with [...]
King corn (syrup)
With corn prices reaching stratospheric levels, it's only natural that these should be consolidation among the world leaders in buying and processing corn. At $7 a bushel, corn costs twice as much as it did a year ago, and with much of Iowa under water, the prices might [...]
Chinese-Indian pharma deal
It is significant, I think, when a company from one major Asian company buys another, with no Western company involves as buyer of seller. That' shat happened last week when the #3 Japanese drug company, Daichi Sankyo, announced a deal to buy a controlling share in Indian drug [...]
Copyright creeps
We have stated before that one of the trends of the last twenty years has been a frantic cycle of copyright extension. The major media companies have formed oligopolies and try to extend copyright protecting their materials. Technology is moving faster, so that the regulations are sidestepped [...]
Organic oligopoly
We've reported on it before, but here's a neat diagram showing the organic brands owned by the big multinational and national food and beverage giants.
Thanks to reader Dave Pollard, edirtor of the always interesting How to Save The World blog.
I'll be off on vacation for [...]
Big Pharma and "free" trade
I recently came across the excellent four-year-old Salon.com article by Adam Graham-Silverman ("Big Pharma's Free Ride", 8/12/05) that details the way in which large drug companies managed to use the CAFTA trade agreement between the US and certain Central American companies) to wipe [...]
Yet another beer deal
SABMiller, the world’s largest brewing company (unless and until InBev manages to buy Anheuser-Busch), announced it would buy Russian brewer Vladpivo, located in Russia’s growing Far East in Vladivostok. It’s not much of a deal money-wise (the price is undisclosed, the assets of the company [...]
B/E Aerospace buys Honeywell unit
B/E Aerospace, a US-based company that is #1 in aircraft cabin interiors, announced it would buy Honeywell's airline fastener and gasket unit, called Consumables Solutions. The division is a leader in replacement parts for aircraft maintenance and has a service to expedite parts, its own and [...]
Then there were four
The number of significant players in wireless telephony in the US will be reduced from five to four, if Verizon Wireless's acquisition of competitor Alltel goes through. The move would unite the #2 and #5 players in this lucrative and highly concentrated market. The [...]
Smucker and Procter & Gamble
It headline was a little off on the New York Times Dealbook article that proclaimed "Smucker Shines to Folgers' Crystals," (5/4/08). True the US-based jams and peanut butter company made its largest acquisition ever, by buying the Folgers coffee division from Proctor & [...]
Market research merger
Another service area gets concentrated, this time in the area of market research powerhouses. UK-based Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) and Germany-based GfK have announced a merger of equals, based on a stock swap. The deal will establish the world's #2 market research firm with the name Gfk-TNS, with [...]
Bayer: Addicted to cartels
German-based Bayer AG, the #2 European chemical company and the #14 pharmaceutical company in the world has been at the nexus of an increasing number of cartels. The areas have mostly been in various forms of synthetic rubber in over-the-counter drugs, and they have happened across the [...]
Disney-Pixar deal: happily ever after?
Two and a half years after the Walt Disney Company bought animation firm Pixar for $7.4 billion. The question then was "will it last?" At least for now, the deal can be claimed as one of the rare smooth acquisitions the media business. That's [...]
Anheuser Busch on the block?
The most notable news of the past week for beer drinkers has been talks of a bid by global beer company InBev for US beermaker Anheuser-Busch. It is though that InBev (#2 in the world in volume) and the #1 US company could link up, [...]
Airfares up
Last week, my friend Michael Donnelly, editor of the CEO Economic Update, asked why American Airlines had announced that it was cutting flights, with no mention of raising fares. Given the fact that airplanes are fuller than ever, why couldn't American make fare boosts and be sure to [...]
Consolidation in the office supplies business
Netherlands-based Corporate Express MV, which is the #1 direct distributor of office supplies in the world, announced plans to acquire rival French office supplies company Lyreco. Privately-held Lyreco is in the same business-to-business sector of the office supplies business, also has a wide international presence, [...]
CBS buys CNET: Hail Mary time?
CBS this week announced it would buy Web site company CNET Networks in a deal worth $1.8 billion. CNET is best known for its technology news site, cmet.com. CNET also owns web sites ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, Chow and Search.com.
Cnet.com is the 17th-busiest Web site [...]
HP to buy EDS
Hewlett-Packard (HP) this week announced a deal to buy Electronic Data Systems (EDS), the large IT outsourcing company. The deal is for $13.9 billion, including debt.
The strategy behind this move is not hard to see. HP is big in there e=areas:
General Electric to move out of the appliance business
GE announced that it would sell off yet another piece of the conglomerate, namely the appliance business. GE started selling appliances in 1907, and the division now represents $7 billion in sales, less than 5% of the company. The division sells refrigerators, [...]
Why did Cablevision buy Newsday?
This week's big media news is the acquisition of Long Island-New York-area tabloid Newsday by cable TV company Cablevision. Cablevision bought the rag from the tottering Tribune Company, for over $620. In doing so, Cablevision outbid News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch (Wall Street Journal, New York Post) [...]
Retailers dropping like flies
Linens 'n Things, the retailer of bedroom and bathroom products, recently declared Chapter 11. The company was squeezed out the market by its bigger rival Bed, Bath, and Beyond on the one hand, and by discounters Wal-Mart and Target on the other.
Linens 'n Things, which has 590 [...]
First a merger, then a demerger
The constant boasting about synergy and enhanced market power that accompany any merger or acquisition is just talk. There are other reasons for such deals, including the financial advantage of the principals, the megalomania of a CEO, the fact that M&A is easier than [...]
Bristol Myers Squibb sells off wound care division
Drugmaker Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) announced it has sold off its ConvaTec division to a private equity consortium for $4.1 billion. The buyers were Avista Capital Partners (US -based) and Nordic Capital (European). These two companies own Denmark-based pharmaceutical company Nycomed.
The division specializes [...]
More on Yahoo-Microsoft
With the absurdly high Microsoft bid for Yahoo even more absurdly refused by Yahoo management, Microsoft shareholders should breathe a sigh of relief that their management's foolish move failed. Bidding far too much for too little is a commonplace in the Web 2.0 sphere, a trend that [...]
Fertilizer shortage
The current food shortage is being driven by another key shortage: one in fertilizer. The addition of inexpensive chemical fertilizer to developing countries' fields, as much as anything else, has driven a worldwide trend to more abundant crops and low-cost food. No longer, according to a recent New [...]
Gum is from Mars
Mars Inc., the privately-held maker of Mars bars, Snickers, M&Ms, Skittles, and Three Musketeers, announced it would purchase Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., the world's #1 chewing gum company, in a $28 billion deal. Mars, which is already the #1 seller of chocolate bars, will become the [...]
Oi
That's the name of a new company to be formed as Brazilian telephone company Telemar acquires Brazilian landline telecom provider Brasil Telecom. The deal is for $3.5 billion.
Oi will control almost two-thirds of the country's land lines and be the #4 mobile phone company. The purchase of Brasil Telecom will [...]
Swallowing up Wendy’s
Triac Companies, led by billionaire Nelson Peltz, announced it would acquire fast food chain Wendy’s for $2.4 billion. Wendy’s is the #3 US hamburger chain, after McDonald’s and Burger King. The purchase is a stock swap, nad is lower than might have been expected. Wendy’s had been seeking [...]
Shaking off the wires
A few weeks ago, Verizon, the #2 US telephone company, took a dramatic step. It finalized the sell-off of its wired telephone lines and its high speed Internet service in northern New England (Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire). The buyer was a company called FairPoint Communications, which [...]
Ferilizer giant
Canadian-based Agrium, the largest North American retailer for farmers and the #3 producer of potash- and nitrogen-based fertilizers, got the go-ahead from the US Federal Trade Commission to buy US-based United Agri Products (UAP), a farm store retail chain. The deal is for $2.5 billion, including debt,
Agrium will [...]
Fire sale at Citigroup
Citigroup announced another big loss, this time for $5.1 billion and announced it would fire another 9,000 employees. And yet the stock market went up. Apparently, analysts thought the losses would be even greater. But Citigroup is low on cash, and it's not clear how much [...]
Blockbuster's big joke
Movie rental chain Blockbuster added some comedy to the business pages this week by making a $1.35 billion unsolicited bid for consumer electronics chain Circuit City. They are kidding, aren't they?
The real difficulty is deciding which company is more likely to go belly up first. But, [...]
Delta to buy Northwest
The big news is the agreed-upon acquisition of Northwest Airlines by Delta, a deal that will create the world's largest airline. Even though this is the big headline deal of the month, the curiosity is how little money, relatively, is involved. Delta will make a stock swap [...]
Cadbury spins off beverages
After a year of effort, Cadbury Schweppes recently got stockholder approval to spin off its North American beverage division, creating anew company to be called Dr Pepper-Snapple Group (DPSG). Cadbury will become a chocolate only company, in a good example of hwy mixing businesses often [...]
Two well-known office brands bought
These are not very big deals, but they are companies that have been around for a while in the tech market and it is interesting to see them go.
Iomega
First, Iomega, the originator of the Zip drive in the 1990s and (in the 1980s) the Bernoulli box, was [...]
Novartis eyes the future
This week Swiss-based drug firm Novartis announced the purchase of Alcon, a US-based eye care company, from Swiss-based Nestlé. The deal is for $39 billion.
Novartis has been making a series of moves in the last few years, away from its patent pharmaceuticals business and into [...]
New problem for the steel industry: the coke oligopoly
Battered with high iron ore prices, the non-very consolidated steel industry now faces an even bigger problem: a major rise in the price of the coke, the specialized coal that they use in the steelmaking process. And while iron price have [...]
Chocolate price fixing continues
We've reported about price fixing by Big Chocolate both in the US and in Europe. Now some real action i slikely, thanks to teh retailers that sell chocolates to consumers.
Now the big vendors (including Hershey, Mars, Nestlé, and Cadbury Schweppes, along with Canadian candy distributor Itwal) [...]
GE Financial discards two, picks up one
General Electric's financial division (GE Money) recently made two moves that reshuffled its holdings, to build what it hopes will be a better hand.
First, it sold its commercial card and corporate payments business to American Express. This unit, which specializes in issuing travel [...]
Monsanto grabs more seeds
Monsanto, already the #1 seed company in the, announced it would buy Dutch-based De Ruiter Seeds Group BV. De Ruiter specializes in vegetable seeds, and is especially dominant in the area of protected crops (greenhouse- grown) vegetables.
The move makes Monsanto the #1 purveyor of vegetable [...]
Pernod buys Absolut
French company Pernod Ricard SA, the #2 seller of liquor in the world, announced it would buy Swedish company Vin & Sprit, the owner of the Absolut vodka brand. The deal was for $8.34 billion, not including debt that will push the cost up by almost half [...]
Two steel deals
The ongoing consolidation of the world steel industry marches on, although at a gradual pace.
This week, Russia's #1 steel company Severstal announced it would buy a US production facility, sparrows Point, from #1 steelmaker ArcelorMittal. The deal was for $810 million. ArcelorMittal was forced to divest the [...]
