I was sorry Kraft Heinz’s £115 billion bid for Unilever collapsed so fast — unveiled on Friday, it was dead by Sunday. Not that I saw the aggressor as a worthy potential victor; but a longer battle would have provided great material for column-sermons on good and bad capitalism. Aha, I hear you ask, but which side is which?
Unilever is the Anglo-Dutch maker of Dove soap and Magnum ice creams. With its dual headquarters in London and Rotterdam, its multi-layered bureaucracy and its bosses who bang on about social responsibility, it might be seen as a big fat corporate proxy for the European Union — in urgent need of a shake-up. Processed-cheese-to-ketchup giant Kraft Heinz, by contrast, is a cost-slashing value-generator bolted together by two of the world’s wiliest investors, Warren Buffett and the Swiss-Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann. If the two conglomerates became one, supermarkets would still offer their brands at the same prices; Unilever shareholders could cash out if they didn’t like it; factories might close, but that’s the way of the world: there’s no other way to maximise profits.
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