Word: rjr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Ross Johnson, flamboyant head of RJR Nabisco, lost his bid for control of the giant food and tobacco company in a $25 billion leveraged-buyout brawl last year, he also lost his job. Last week RJR's new owner, the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, announced its surprise choice for Johnson's replacement: Louis Gerstner, 47, marketing maven and president of American Express...
Gerstner, who was widely expected to succeed American Express Chairman James Robinson, 53, has never run a tobacco business. But KKR partner Henry Kravis chose Gerstner for his prowess as a strategic planner. Among other accomplishments, Gerstner launched the successful Platinum card. As chairman at RJR Nabisco, he will have to engineer the sale of about $8 billion in assets to pay off some of KKR's buyout borrowings. But his compensation will be as tall as his task: as much as $45 million over five years...
...handful of global media giants." Declared the Chicago Tribune: "The deal creates a corporate dynamo." In Munich the daily newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung disagreed, predicting that the union would be a "Tower of Babel." And on Wall Street, where there had not been much excitement since the contest for RJR Nabisco, investors and speculators were agog over the proposed $9.5 billion exchange of Time shares for Warner's -- the largest stock swap ever...
...RJR has other innovations to offer the shrinking ranks of smokers. The company has been working on Chelsea, a vanilla-scented cigarette designed for women smokers. Test marketing will begin next month...
Harvard was a limited partner in the largest LBO ever--the Kravis, Kolberg and Roberts takeover of RJR-Nabisco--and Lewis said that buyout was "very well conceived...