Kraft launched a hostile bid to take over Cadbury's
We all love chocolate don’t we, and what’s the best chocolate around? That, of course, would be anything made by Cadbury’s. Other than the chocolate they produce, the other great thing about the Cadbury’s is that it is British. But for how much longer? About half way through last year the evil overarching company from America, Kraft, lumbered over to our little island and again tried to close its greedy fist around yet another company they did nothing to make a success.
It’s a sad state of affairs when companies can’t even be successful without fear of a bigger boy coming and stealing their lunch money. Being a six-foot-tall 12-year-old amongst your four-foot classmates is all well and good until the new boy shows up and he just so happens to be a 30-year-old with paranoid schizophrenia and a large machete for an arm. America, by the way, is the 30-year-old in this metaphor.
In July Kraft came over and made a multimillion dollar bid for the chocolate company, which was deftly rejected. Now they are at it again, determined to get the company ‘on the cheap’. Now, I don’t know how much Kraft’s buying of Cadbury’s would affect the industry, or the product itself. For all I know, not a single little thing would change. But that’s not the point. The point is that the super powers moving in and trying to dip their fingers in as many honey pots as they possibly can isn’t fair.
Imagine if you will, the elderly couple down the street. They open a little sweet shop where the shelves are lined with jars of sweets and piles of chocolate; they do it not for the money but to see the smiling faces on the little children who come in every day after school. They become so popular, in fact, that they gain the notice of a mainstream confectionary distributor who immediately buys them out with their millions of pounds and replaces them with a brand-name money-spinner.
While Cadbury’s isn’t really the equivalent to an old couple running a shop, it is small potatoes compared to some of the companies out there, and we should try our hardest to reject the forced bids of American multimillion dollar companies who are just trying to squeeze some more money out of us.
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