Hershey Co on Thursday rejected a takeover offer from Oreo maker Mondelez International Inc that would bring some of the world’s best known cookies and chocolates under one company.
It confirmed receiving a preliminary offer from Mondelez for a mix of cash and stock totaling US$107 for each share of Hershey’s common stock. That would value the deal at about US$22.3 billion, according to FactSet.
Hershey said that, following a review, its board determined the offer provided “no basis for further discussion.” A deal would be subject to approval by the Hershey Trust, a controlling shareholder.
A spokeswoman for Mondelez, Valerie Moens, declined to comment on whether the company would make a new offer.
The Wall Street Journal, citing sources it did not name, had reported earlier in the day that Mondelez told Hershey it would take the chocolate maker’s name and move its global headquarters to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Hershey’s shares surged following the report, and closed up nearly 17 percent at US$113.49.
Mondelez shares closed up almost 6 percent at US$45.51.
In addition to Oreos, Mondelez, based in Deerfield, Illinois, owns Cadbury chocolates, Trident gum, Nabisco cookies and Ritz crackers.
The acquisition of Hershey would give the combined company 18 percent of the global candy market and make it the industry’s largest player, according to Euromonitor International.
Mars Inc, which makes M&M’s and Snickers, is currently No. 1 with 13.5 percent of the market.
The deal would also give Mondelez a bigger presence in its home candy market.
While Mondelez controls Cadbury abroad, Hershey has the licensing rights to the brand in the US. Mondelez gets the majority of its revenue from overseas, while Hershey gets most its revenue from North America.
JPMorgan Chase & Co analyst Ken Goldman said that at least part of Mondelez’s rationale for making the bid was probably “defensive in nature,” as the company did not want to be acquired by The Kraft Heinz Co, if Kraft were interested.
A tie-up between Mondelez and Hershey would mark just the latest chapter in a series of deals in the packaged food industry, with companies looking for ways to improve their financial results while up against struggling sales growth in saturated markets such as the US.
When Heinz announced plans to buy Kraft last year, for instance, executives cited the cost savings that would be achieved by combining manufacturing and distribution networks.
That deal took place just a couple years after Kraft split with Mondelez in 2012.
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
‘IT HURTS TOO MUCH’: After talks between Blizzard and NetEase over their contract broke down, servers hosting Blizzard’s games in China were shut down Millions of Chinese gamers have lost access to World of Warcraft after a furious dispute between US title owner Activision Blizzard Inc and NetEase Inc (網易), its longtime local partner in the world’s biggest gaming market. Devotees of the popular game took to social media networks to bemoan the loss, with one posting an image of a failed connection message accompanied by crying emojis. “It really hurts my heart,” one wrote. “It hurts, it hurts too much,” another said. Massively popular worldwide, particularly in the 2000s, World of Warcraft — often abbreviated as WoW — is an online multiplayer role-playing game set in
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday accused Alphabet Inc’s Google of abusing its dominance in digital advertising, threatening to dismantle a key business at the heart of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful Internet firms. The US government said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12 percent of Google’s revenues in 2021, but also plays a vital role in the search engine and cloud company’s overall sales. “Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the