Word: marketed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pictures of the stock-market crash...
...announced a deal to buy Beijing-based Huiyuan Juice Group, a privately owned company started by a Chinese entrepreneur 17 years ago. Huiyuan, whose stock is traded on the Hong Kong exchange, is the largest producer of pure orange juice in the country, with over 40% of the market. Although Huiyuan's founders and major shareholders endorsed the sale, the government blocked it on antitrust grounds, arguing that the acquisition would have hurt small orange-juice producers in China and led to higher prices for consumers...
...deal was widely seen as the first big test of an antitrust law that Beijing enacted last August. In the eyes of foreign investors, that test is now officially a failure. Together, Coke and Huiyuan's combined share of the orange-juice market - itself just a sliver of the overall nonalcoholic-beverage market - would have been around 20%. The segment Huiyuan dominates - undiluted OJ - is for pricier products and is relatively small. Coca-Cola's Minute Maid brand plays in the less expensive, larger segment of the market. (Read a TIME story on Coke...
...Antitrust lawyers in Beijing were befuddled by the Ministry of Commerce's ruling. "From a purely competitive point of view, this would not have affected the [nonalcoholic-beverage] market," says Michael Gu, a lawyer specializing in corporate finance with the Zhong Lun Law Firm. Before the ruling, a source close to the deal from the Coca-Cola side said, "There is just not a competition issue, no matter how you look at it." He called the proposed acquisition a "marriage made in heaven...
...Beijing was plainly taking into account considerations other than market share. Huiyuan is a high-profile national brand, and its sale to Coke had become a hobbyhorse for nationalists who often dominate popular Internet chat rooms in China. Zhu Xingli, founder and CEO of Huiyuan, famously said that he had "raised the company like a son" but was "selling it like a pig" - that is, at the market, for the highest price available. Blogger Zhang Xianfeng retorted, "The problem with selling to a multinational company is that it's no longer Chinese deciding which part...