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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...
...Broader participation in sports seems to have spun a unique thread of national identity as well. Spanish athletes often use their moment of glory to give a nod to the patria. After winning Wimbledon, Nadal ran to embrace his coach and family, then stepped into the next box to greet Spain's Prince Felipe and Princess Leticia, thanking them by name minutes later while addressing the crowd from center court. Sastre spoke on Spain's national evening news of his pride in bringing glory to his country. Through sports Spaniards seem able to find a sense of national identity that...
...glamour biz, The Hills (Season 4 starts Aug. 18; Seasons 1 through 3 are out on DVD) comes from a proud heritage of California teen soaps. We met the protagonist, Lauren Conrad, on MTV's high school reality soap Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. After graduation, she was spun off to The Hills, moved to L.A., landed an internship at Teen Vogue and made new friends. There's frenemy Heidi Montag, with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Spencer Pratt, the social-climbing Laddie Macbeth who drove a wedge between her and Lauren; Audrina Patridge, Lauren's less confident...
...cook up complex deals that can take cadres of lawyers and accountants a week to disentangle in order to sell and buy back assets. Just last week TCI said it would reacquire Liberty Media and its cable networks, including the Family Channel and Black Entertainment Television, which Malone spun off in 1991 to avoid antitrust scrutiny. While Smith and Malone worked in different industries, they shared a common vision of the interactive future. The two men began meeting three years ago at telecommunications conferences, at a time when cable firms and telephone companies were thought to be rivals...