47 ACQUISITIONS IN APRIL

April was a busy month for food and drink mergers and acquisitions, with 47 appearing on the bevblog.net database, which has a link on the right of this page. Four featured values in excess of $1,000 million:

$13,600 million for Thermo Fisher Scientific to buy Life Technologies, both based in the United States €7,500 million on Joh A Benckiser’s purchase of D E Master Blenders 1753, formerly known as Douwe Egberts $2,950 million for Archer Daniels Midland to acquire Australia’s GrainCorp €2,300 million sales for Refresco’s European soft drinks merger with Gerber Emig.

The sectors covered were very diverse with 11 transactions in alcohol, 7 in soft drinks, 6 in dairy, 4 in meat and 3 each in hot drinks, ingredients and packaging.

23 took place within national borders and 24 were international. 26 countries were involved overall. As ever the United States featured in the most at 16, followed by France on 8, the United Kingdom on 7, the Netherlands on 5 and Germany on 4.