Word: ricard
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...Patrick Ricard, boss of the french drinks giant that bears his name, enjoys a glass of pastis before lunch. But at a recent breakfast in his private dining room overlooking the Eiffel Tower, he was strictly a coffee man, despite having just pulled off a deal worth celebrating with something stronger. In March, Pernod Ricard stunned its rivals by landing one of the biggest prizes in the drinks sector: Absolut, the world's leading premium vodka, whose acquisition, Ricard concedes, was "a bit of a coup...
...everyone agreed. As Ricard buttered his toast, the markets battered his firm for paying $8.34 billion for Absolut's parent company, Vin & Sprit--which was almost 21 times the Swedish firm's gross operating profit last year. As if to suggest that Pernod Ricard had overreached, Bruce Carbonari, CEO of Fortune Brands (which was trumped in the Absolut auction), claimed that the price for V&S would not provide an "appropriate return" for shareholders. Yet le patron remained unperturbed. Three years ago, the company leveraged itself heavily to acquire Britain's Allied Domecq, a $13 billion deal that doubled Pernod...
...public. A year from now, "we'll sit down and say, Is the company at this point geared for a reasonable IPO?," says Carlyle Group co-founder Dan D'Aniello. Carlyle, together with Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, bought Dunkin' Brands from the French beverage giant Pernod Ricard for $2.4 billion in March 2006. To make that investment pay off, Dunkin' will have to fend off competitors trying to take a bite out of its core breakfast business while it hopes to eat some of their lunch. "The biggest challenge is to be able to achieve growth, given...
...Happiness Matthieu Ricard Lottery winners, researchers have found, are no happier a year after their windfall than they were before it (they've bought a house too big for them, they don't know who their friends are anymore, they spend all their time with lawyers). Those who are suddenly rendered paraplegic, studies have also discovered, end up, after a year or so of adjustment, feeling no unhappier than before. Happiness, in short, is something intrinsic to us, like our muscles-and yet it's also, like muscle, something we can train and learn, quantifiably, to build up. In Happiness...
...year's biggest deals: the $28 billion acquisition last June by Telecom Italia of the 44% stake in mobile phone company Telecom Italia Mobile it didn't already own, and the $22 billion purchase by Italian bank UniCredito of Germany's Bayerische HypoVereinsbank. Other major deals included Pernod Ricard's acquisition of British drinks firm Allied Domecq, and a continuing three-way fight for control of that bastion of shareholder capitalism, the London Stock Exchange. According to Morgan Stanley, the number of deals last year with a volume of $1 billion or more doubled from 2004, while the number...