Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

No tea is British, even Yorkshire tea. The Selby tea fields are apparently a myth ;)

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

oh stop it Andrew, this sort of thing has been happening for decades . . . and well you know it. You seem to stop at nothing if it gives you the chance for a Brexit blast :nono:

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Another one of those political wheezes where they say a lot and then 5 years down the road nothing has come of it..

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

I fear this is an uncomfortable truth to have generated such a reaction. ;)

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

You are talking complete nonsense, large companies have been buying up smaller ones for as long as businesses have existed, just look at Cadbury for a UK example.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Nope. My suggestion was that it makes it cheaper and therefore more likely to happen. Not that it has never happened in the past which of course it has.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Talking nonsense. Takeovers and buyouts of companies, British or otherwise have been happening for decades. It has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit or a weak £.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

You seem to have ignored Andrew's last post. A weak pound does make more takeovers by overseas companies likely. One of the many negative Brexit dividends coming our way. Project Reality will be costly lesson.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

My original post could have been better.
British companies have been acquired in the past by overseas companies (and vice versa) but to see two large companies acquired in this time frame (Costa £3.9bn, Arm Holdings £24.3bn) is a significant shift.
Mr K has covered how a weak £ makes UK companies more attractive takeover targets.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Its not a significant shift Andrew as for many decades it has been happening as my point is would the countries mentioned in a previous post by me let it happen to their major companies and the answer is no.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Seems every thread keeps being dragged back to Brexit. Very tedious.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

It's significant in terms of the size of the companies and time period.

China is definitely pretty closed but it's an emerging country so you would expect it to be more closed than the UK.

France is becoming more liberal and the country recently agreed for Alstom to be acquired by GE and Siemens. Lots of famous companies in France are foreign-owned including Renault Trucks (Volvo Trucks of Sweden), Waterman Pens (Newell of USA) and Ciroc Vodka (Diageo of the UK).
Germany has been fairly liberal but after the Chinese started to acquire companies, it has tightened up on non-EU acquirers. https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/...outside-the-eu

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Cadbury was bought a few years back and that had nothing to do with Brexit or a week £.

Costa would have been bought no matter what. Whitbread had been looking to either spin off as a separate entity or sell it for a while now to focus on Premier Inn.

Also the Chinese have been buying international companies for years.

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

Do you have evidence to back this up, or is this just made up guesswork ?


There is no evidence of 'brexit' or a 'weak pound' being invloved here, just business dealings ;

Re: Coca-Cola to buy Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
 

No one is arguing about why Cadbury was acquired or saying that British companies have never been acquired by overseas companies before, it's the fact that two large acquisitions (>£1bn) have come in a short period of time. I agree that the Chinese have been buying overseas companies - they own Volvo Cars, London Taxis and Motorola phones to name a few brands but it's one-way traffic.

The plan was to float Costa Coffee on the London Stock Exchange and not sell it so it would have remained British. The weakened £ following the Brexit vote ($1.45 before the vote, versus $1.30 today) contributed to it being a cheaper potential acquisition for overseas acquirers like Coca-Cola and hence made this outcome more likely.

---------- Post added at 17:22 ---------- Previous post was at 17:20 ----------

There is an English tea plantation in Sunny Cornwall! :)
https://tregothnan.co.uk

---------- Post added at 17:27 ---------- Previous post was at 17:22 ----------

I'm sorry that you get that impression but if I believe it is connected, I think it's best that I say so and let people discuss the hypothesis.
Having said that, I think this is the only recent thread I think in which the B-word has been raised. :)