CORPORATE ACTIVITY
Mergers and extrications beat new paths
Four of 2016’s largest corporate stories could shape the local and global landscape this year , writes Hilary Joffe
Four of 2016’s largest corporate stories capture a couple of key themes that could again define corporate deal-making in 2017. They also reflect new regulatory trends that could shape the landscape locally and globally in the year ahead. In financial services, it was about "coming home" as London-based Barclays plc said it would shed its controlling stake in Barclays Africa, aka Absa. And London-listed Old Mutual plc revealed plans for a "managed separation" of its four businesses, which will ultimately see Old Mutual’s head office come home to SA. In beer and beverages, the consolidation was in the other direction, geographically speaking. Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $104bn buyout of London-listed SABMiller took the ownership of SA’s dominant beer brewer even further from home than it already was. As it turned out, that "mega brew" deal also prompted a shift, to the US, in control of Africa’s largest soft-drinks producer, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA), which was itself the product o...
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