We haven't heard much from Missouri politicians in the last week on the proposed acquisition of Anheuser-Busch Cos. by the Brazilian-Belgian InBev SA. But local Republicans and Democrats alike have said they're against it, and Budweiser fans in St. Louis and around the country are doing their best to drum up patriotic opposition.
So as the market reacts to A-B's rejection of the bid and presentation of its own
value-creation plan Friday morning, it seems like a good time to pause and reflect on some past controversial cross-border deals. Because the fact is, we've seen this before -- and we'll see a lot more of it in the years to come.
Remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Japanese were buying up the U.S.? Two of the scariest deals for some Americans involved a couple of movie studios -- companies pretty close to the heart of our culture. Sony bought Columbia Pictures, and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. bought MCA. There was discussion (as in this 1
990 New York Times article) of whether Matsushita in particular might try to censor certain topics in movies, such as how Japanese actions in World War II were represented.
Five years later Matsushita beat a painful retreat from Hollywood. Sony stayed on through many troubles and today runs an entertainment business that nobody thinks of as especially Japanese. One interesting result of the deal is the fact that Sony's CEO (since 2005) is the non-Japanese
Sir Howard Stringer.
U.S. companies have also made big waves with cross-border deals. In an earlier post, I mentioned Procter & Gamble Co.'s success at going global, contrasting it with A-B's relative caution. P&G now gets around 60% of its sales from outside the U.S. But it hasn't accomplished this without ever hurting anyone's feelings. Take a look back at its hard-fought 2003
takeover of Germany's Wella.
And what did the Swedes say when Ford Motor Co. bought Volvo in 1999? Actually,
they were glad -- mainly because the buyer wasn't Fiat SA or Renault SA. Hey, these things get complicated. And here's an intriguing what-if, considering Ford's current travails: If Renault had won Volvo back in the mid-1990s, would the company today be part of an operation led by
Carlos Ghosn, considered among the ablest of auto execs?
Lest we forget, many Belgians were recently rooting against the outsiders in one the hardest-fought, nationalism-stoking takeover battles yet: the 2006 acquisition of Arcelor by Mittal Steel. Today, following a successful best-of-both
integration (and a lot more deals) ArcelorMittal is the world's largest steel company. -
Kenneth Klee
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