|
 Sadia and Perdigão, Brazil's two biggest food companies announced on Tuesday, May 19, plans to merge, creating an exporting powerhouse in a stock swap deal prompted by the global financial crisis. Executives from Perdigão SA and Sadia SA said they expect their new enterprise, to be called Brasil Foods SA, to become the world's top exporter of processed meat and chicken.
The merger creates a global food powerhouse with combined annual revenue of US$ 10.6 billion, 42 plants and a workforce of 119.000. The two were already Brazil's leading chicken and frozen food producers.
The deal is subject to regulatory approval in Brazil and Europe, a top market for Brazilian exports such as chicken. Analysts predict Brazil's government will quickly back it amid a broader push to boost large companies hurt by the economic downturn.
"We have a planet to conquer," Perdigão chief executive Nildemar Secches told reporters.
Perdigão will control 68% of the new enterprise and Sadia will have a 32% stake, Secches said. It will also look to raise as much as US$ 1.9 billion in a public offering of new shares by July, he added.
Sadia sought a partner after losing nearly US$ 400 million on bad currency bets as Brazil's Real dropped last year. Those losses surpassed the company's 2007 profits.
The new company will dominate many areas of Brazilian food sales, including frozen and processed meat products, margarine and pizza. Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, meanwhile predicted that its sales abroad will reach US$ 4.8 billion.
Luiz Furlan led Sadia for a decade before serving as trade and industry minister in Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration. He resigned in 2007 and returned to Sadia last October as the financial crisis worsened.
He and Secches will share the chief executive post at the new company for two years.
Mercopress
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.