Word: soft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cadbury Schweppes' two-pronged portfolio of candy and soft drinks wasn't too far off strategically from the soft-drink and snack-food approach that has served PepsiCo so well. The difference is that Pepsi has Pepsi, not Dr Pepper, as a top brand and an organization that can execute to the last bottle cap. For Cadbury, growing two separate businesses proved an insurmountable task, undone by bad execution, bad luck and the weird actors who dominate candyland--the secretive, privately held Mars Inc. and the stumbling, publicly held Hershey Co., which is controlled, ineptly, by the Hershey Trust...
Under relentless pressure from shareholders like agitator Nelson Peltz to sell its beverage business--yet unable to find a buyer given the collapse of the credit markets--Cadbury spun off its soft-drinks unit as the Dr Pepper Snapple Group earlier this year, leaving it once again a stand-alone candy company. And a relatively diminished one. Cadbury was dethroned as the king of candy by the surprise buyout of Wrigley by Mars, giving Mars-Wrigley a 14.4% share of the global confectionery market, compared with Cadbury's 10.1%, according to Wachovia Capital Markets...
That makes the newly spun-off Dr Pepper Snapple Group a bit of a soft-drink Frankenstein, cobbled together from odd parts. Dr Pepper has acquired about $1.2 billion in bottling assets over the past two years, and that will likely continue, which bodes well for its longer-term outlook, says Wachovia analyst Brian Scudieri. Young is predicting that the Dr Pepper Snapple Group will deliver annual revenue growth of 3% to 5% and earnings-per-share increases in the high single digits over the next few years...
...shot down three times over the English Channel. Her husband survived being shot down over Hanoi. Listening to her talk, you get the sense that she's every bit the warrior too, with her own discipline, her own mission, her own scars. (Her wrist is in a soft cast?some of the bones are fused?because of injuries made worse by fans who shook her hand too enthusiastically.) "I want my sons led by a Commander in Chief who understands what it means to send young men and women into combat?and more importantly, how to bring them home." That...
...thing." Says New Hampshire's Bob Smith, a former Republican Senator who tangled with McCain: "He did get shafted, and he never really got over it. I think he said, I'm on my own now." The Keating ordeal led McCain to team up with Democrat Russ Feingold on soft-money restrictions - not only to attack political corruption but also to remove what he saw as a cloud hanging over honorable politicians...