Japan’s Suntory Beverage & Food Ltd. has agreed to buy the Lucozade and Ribena drink brands from GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) for £1.35 billion ($2.1 billion),
Bloomberg reported.
Lucozade is an energy drink and Ribena is a brand targeted toward children. Suntory will acquire global rights to the brands and Glaxo’s Coleford manufacturing site, the report noted.
Suntory Beverage plans to spend up to 500 billion yen ($5 billon) on takeovers to reduce its reliance on the Japanese market, the Bloomberg article said. It plans to acquire companies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. This year it bought 51% of PepsiCo Inc.’s soft-drink business in Vietnam, Bloomberg reported. In 2009, it bought France’s Orangina Schweppes Group and New Zealand’s Frucor Beverages Group.
A
Financial Times
report
noted that in July, the family-controlled parent company, Suntory Holdings, raided $4 billion by spinning off its soft drinks operations in an initial public offering. Suntory’s beer and whiskey business remains privately owned. (Sources: Bloomberg, Sept. 9, 2013;
Financial Times,
Sept. 6, 2013.)
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