Germany/UK: Hanson, once the most feared corporate predator on either side of the Atlantic, is itself about to be taken over. The company, built on a string of acquisitions in the 1970s and 1980s that took it into bricks, batteries, beer, cigarettes, chemicals and coal, has accepted an Euro11.82billion offer from the German building materials group, HeidelbergCement. If the deal is backed by Hanson shareholders, it will create the second largest building materials company in the world with sales of Euroi 5bn and more than 70,000 employees. In its heyday Hanson was a Euro16.25bn conglomerate. Built by Lord James Hanson and Lord George White, its trademark was to buy underperforming businesses, often in unfashionable manufacturing or low technology sectors and then fund at least part of the purchase price with subsequent disposals, leaving Hanson sitting on a handsome profit. At first purchases were relatively modest - Euro36.95 for Lindustries in 1979 and Ever Ready Battery maker, Berec, for Euro28.08m. The deals, however, soon got bigger; almost Euro369.55m for London Brick and more than Euro372.55m for US Industries in the early 1980s. By the second half of the decade, its US expansion justified its advertising slogan'a company from over here doing rather well over there.' Deals included almost Euro745m for SCM Corporation and Euroi, 26bn for fellow conglomerate, Kidde. In between Hanson squeezed in its Euro3.69bn acquisition of Imperial Group, at that time the UK's biggest. Such was the power of the Hanson name that its appearance on the ICI share register was credited with pushing Britain's ultimate industrial blue chip into divesting its pharmaceutical business. By the end of the 1980s, Hanson's acquisition spree was running out of steam as the number of targets big enough and cheap enough to keep the bandwagon rolling began to dry up, though there was still time to fit in the Euro5.17bn takeover of Consolidated Goldfields. Over the past decade Hanson has focused on the building materials and aggregates business, spinning off Imperial Tobacco and Millennium in the US.
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