Word: mergers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BUSINESS Betting on the 21st Century In a merger with potentially historic implications for the communications and entertainment industries, Bell Atlantic Corp. announced it would acquire Tele- Communications Inc., the nation's largest cable-TV operator, and its cable- programming affiliate, Liberty Media. The resulting company could dominate the ''information superhighway'' of the future. The complicated stock transaction is valued at $21.4 billion...
...expected casualty in the merger might be marketing: Anheuser-Busch spent an estimated $378 million on advertising in the U.S. last year. Bud's campaigns involving the Whassup Guys, the Clydesdales, NASCAR and the Superbowl have become iconic mainstays of American advertising...
...InBev itself was only created in 2004, from the merger of Belgium's Interbrew with Brazil's AmBev. It is headquartered in the Flemish city of Leuven, where the company can trace its brewing roots back to 1366. Though the board includes former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, the firm's power brokers are Brazilian investment bankers who have placed an accounting technique known as zero-based budgeting at the heart of their global strategy. It compels divisions to justify all costs for each year, rather than simply adjusting the baseline spending from the previous year...
...will now be called Anheuser-Busch InBev, and headed by InBev's Brazilian chief executive, Carlos Brito. InBev has pledged that the company's North American headquarters would remain in St. Louis, and that none of Anheuser's 12 U.S. breweries would be closed. The two brewers say their merger will generate annual savings of $1.5 billion from measures like better managing the supply chain and that layoffs will be kept to a minimum because there is little current overlap between the two businesses...
...fend off the unsolicited merger, Anheuser-Busch management last month itself unveiled its own "Blue Ocean" cost-cutting program, promising savings of $1.09 billion by 2011 but losing around 1,200 jobs in the process. And with global recession threatening, beer markets consolidating, barley and aluminum prices soaring, and sales declining in many mature markets, there are fears of further cuts. Tellingly, Brito made no promises on job cuts, nor on the sale of non-core assets like Anheuser-Busch's theme parks and its aluminium can recycling units...