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Ten Classic American Brands Owned by Foreign Companies

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June 13, 2024 Graphics/Design:

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Ten Classic American Brands Owned by Foreign Companies

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Popular brands have an intangible effect on culture. As symbols of eras past and present, they’re associated with identities, lifestyles, and trends in society.

Using data from 24/7 Wall St, we list some classic American brands that are owned by foreign companies

A List of American-Founded, Foreign-Owned Brands

Tiffany and Co.’s 183-year American story came to an end in 2019 after French luxury giant LVMH announced plans to acquire the company.

The sale did not progress smoothly but in 2021, LVMH completed its acquisition for a slightly-reduced $16 billion price tag.

In the years since, Tiffany’s earnings have doubled, LVMH’s stock price has risen 50%, and Bernard Arnault—LVMH Chairman and CEO—has become the world’s richest man.

CompanyFirst Sold to
Foreign BuyerCurrent Owner Trader Joe’s1979🇩🇪 Aldi Nord Burger King1989🇬🇧 Grand Metropolitan 7-Eleven1991🇯🇵 Seven & I Holdings Lucky Strike1994🇬🇧 British American Tobacoo Chrysler1998🇳🇱 Stellantis N.V. Ben and Jerry’s2000🇬🇧 Unilever* IBM (PC Business)2005🇨🇳 Lenovo Budweiser2008🇧🇪 Anheuser-Busch InBev Popeyes2017🇨🇦 Restaurant Brands International Tiffany & Co.2019**🇫🇷 LVMH
*Unilever has announced it’s spinning off its ice cream businesses. **Deal finalized in 2021. Data current to May 2024.

Another brand from 19th century America, Lucky Strike, saw its ownership change in 1994, when British American Tobacco Company acquired the American Tobacco Company.

Meanwhile, a hallmark of the American automaker landscape, Chrysler merged with Daimler-Benz in 1998. Since then however the company has moved and merged with others (Fiat) and is now under the Stellantis N.V. group, with headquarters located in Hoofddorp, Netherlands.

A more recently born U.S. brand, (in comparison to earlier mentioned stalwarts), Trader Joe’s stayed American-owned for only 12 years after it was founded in 1967. Theo Albrecht, owner and CEO of Aldi Nord, a German supermarket chain, acquired the business in 1979.

EU bonds fall after MSCI declines to include them in sovereign debt indices

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Fund Manager Laura Foll on ESG, M&S and Shein

Christopher Johnson: You hold fossil fuels across the portfolio, so in the fund I mentioned and the investment trusts. And climate change is, I would say, the greatest challenge of our time. How do you justify investing in oil and gas companies with everything going on?

Laura Foll: Really good question. What you’ve always got to bear in mind is we’re running these funds through the UK benchmark and the FTSE All-Share has about 11% in fossil fuels. So, we, in all of the funds that I manage across the four funds, are underweight fossil fuels. So, we have less in the benchmark. And so, the question is why do we have them at all? So, we do hold less than the benchmark, but why are they there? It’s a case of portfolio balance. We hold – and this is quite nuanced, bear with me – we hold quite a lot in the industrial sector, again across all the different funds. We are overweight that industrial sector. And these are companies that use a lot of fossil fuels and need to use a lot of fossil fuels. They’re trying to move away from it, but in some cases they can’t. So, think huge furnaces that need to heat up to 1,000 degrees plus, and you can’t do that at the moment without using gas. And we have a lot of these companies in the portfolio.

The oil and gas weighting is almost a hedge for those industrial companies. So, what I mean by that is you get to a Ukraine year where suddenly the fossil fuel price, oil, gas spikes beyond what anyone thought would have happened. Those industrial companies had a really tough time because they are using a lot of those fossil fuels. Their input costs suddenly jump up unexpectedly. You have to have something else elsewhere in the portfolio that can shoulder some of that and do better in those types of times. And in 2022, it was those fossil fuel companies that acted as a balance for the portfolio and helped shoulder some of that burden.

So, the way I think of it is it is underweight, but we need to have a small position in this area for those years like the Ukraine year that no one saw coming. If it had been six months before Ukraine, no one would have forecasted gas doing what it

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