50 acquisitions in January

50 in total and 8 over $500 million including 1 above $10,000 million. That was the January tally for food and drink transactions recorded on the bevblog.net acquisitions database.

The biggest was ThaiBev’s $11,200 million purchase of Singapore’s Fraser & Neave.

Then came three large Coca-Cola bottler mergers:
• €3,000 million sales from the long heralded merger of 7 Spanish bottlers
• $2,940 million sales from the merger of 3 Brazilian bottlers
• $700 million value for Mexico’s Yoli in merging with Coca-Cola Femsa.

There was also:
• $1,700 million for Ardagh’s packaging purchase of Verallia North America from Saint-Gobain
• $700 million for Hormel to buy US Skippy peanut butter from Unilever
• $500 million for CCL’s packaging takeover of two divisions from Avery Dennison
• plus the French dairy operations merger between Agrial and Eurial.

Among the 50, 10 were in alcohol, 7 in soft drinks, 7 in dairy, 5 in ingredients and 4 in packaging.

22 were inside individual countries and 28 across borders, affecting 28 countries in all. The US was active in 20, the United Kingdom in 9 and the Netherlands in 6. 5 countries were active in 4 each – Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

The Netherlands made 5 international sales without any purchases. Canada made 4 international purchases without any sales.