Vevey, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The ongoing guessing game about who will own Cadbury is expected to end Wednesday 6 January when Kraft unveils shareholder response to its hostile takeover bid for Cadbury, but Nestlé won’t be one of the owners. The Swiss-based Nestlé says it is not bidding on Cadbury, ending speculation that it would fight Kraft for the UK-based Cadbury sweets company. Nestlé has instead offered to buy Kraft’s pizza division, the leader in the US and Canada in the frozen pizza market.
Nestlé’s $3.7 billion offer for the pizza business is allowing Kraft to increase its cash offer for Cadbury.
The pizza deal covers a number of brands, including DiGiorno, Tombstone, California Pizza Kitchen, Jack’s and Delissio.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Jean-Jacques Roth, who has just resigned as editor in chief of Le Temps newspaper, has been named to head the joint television-radio news team at the recently created Radio Television Suisse Romande (RTSR). The new entity is the result of the merger of public radio and television stations RSR and TSR, which join forces in January 2010. The two are already part of SSR, the Swiss public broadcasting company.
Roth is the only outsider of the eight person senior management team named Monday 21 December. The news teams will be coordinated, but remain separate, with Bernard Rappaz heading television news and Patrick Nussbaum heading the radio team.
The complete management group:
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The second and third largest mobile phone operators in Switzerland, Orange and Sunrise, will merge, with France Telecom buying 75 percent of the shares in Sunrise, which is owned by TDC of Denmark, for €1.5 billion. TDC will hold 25 percent. The combined company will have 38 percent of the mobile market and 13 percent of the fixed, thus positioning it to provide stiffer competition for telephone leader Swisscom, which formerly had a Swiss monopoly.
Links to other sites: Orange (Fre), TSR (Fre) and joint press release (Eng) with details
Shared Internet news ok, but not on radio and TV
Geneva / Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The merger of TSR, public television in French-speaking Switzerland, and RSR, public radio, is meeting some resistance from cantonal governments, which insist the two editorial teams must remain separate and independent. Vaud and Geneva, in a joint statement released Monday 23 November, say they would also like to see the traditional roles maintained of Lausanne as a radio centre and Geneva as a television centre. The statement was made in advance of today’s presentation of the merger project to the board of SSR, the parent company.
Spanish air carrier Iberia and British company British Air (BA) have ended 16 months of negotiations with an agreement to merge as equal partners, but the deal is far from done. The new company would be tax resident in Spain, but the head office would be in Britain. BA’s pension plan debt of £2.66 billion, exactly equal to the value of the company, must be brought under control or Iberia could still back out of the deal, according to the terms of the agreement. Iberia Friday morning 13 November posted a nine-month pre-tax and interest operating loss of €331 million, higher than analysts expected, for a net loss of €181m during the period. The new airline, which does not yet have a name (TopCo is being used temporarily), would be Europe’s third largest, after Lufthansa and Air France-KLM.
Links to other sites: El Pais (Spa), Financial Times, London Stock Exchange news, Times, UK
...and then there was one
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss Competition Commission has given its blessing to the proposed sale of Edipresse’s Swiss operations to Zurich-based Tamedia on the grounds that competition is not threatened by the takeover. Edipresse, Switzerland’s third-largest media company, is based in Lausanne and its operations in Switzerland are limited to the French-speaking area. Tamedia owns media mostly in the German-speaking part of the country.
The competition authorites say that there is no significant overlap in the market coverage.
