The head swims at how the corporate giants keep swallowing and spitting out companies.
Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical manufacturer that has another pharmaceutical manufacturer to digest as fast as it can — through a merger with Pharmacia Corp. — now is selling its chewing gum business.
And it is some business. Imagine paying $4.2 billion — cash — as Britain's Cadbury Schweppes Plc plans to, to buy Pfizer's Adams candy unit, maker of Trident and Dentyne.
Cadbury will become the world's second-largest maker of products that celebrate mastication without nutrition. The biggest is America's own Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.
Only the human race could invent chewing gum. Other members of the animal kingdom demand more results from their fangs. The late comedian Fred Allen, in contempt of the vacuousness of television, called it "chewing gum for the eyes." And real men used to chew tobacco, which, although dietetically null, made a statement in the pocket of the cheek and did not stick to the shoes when carelessly disposed of.
There's a lot of pedigree in the gum business, which derived from the rubber business. Pfizer wants to concentrate on making pharmaceuticals. It only got into gum when it acquired Warner-Lambert two years ago. And Warner-Lambert had picked up the onetime Adams Chewing Gum Co. 40 years ago.
Long ago, there really was a Mr. Adams. His firm invented Chiclets and bought out a Mr. Beeman, memorialized in the radio commercial that jingled the flavor of "Beeman's Pepsin Chewing Gum, please."
On the other side of the sea, Cadbury Schweppes mixes a lot of ancestral lines. It was once a Cadbury company (chocolates) and a Schweppes maker of tonic waters represented in the United States by a very upper-upper pitchman, "Commander" Whitehead. He looked the British Navy part in TV spots, rigged out in tuxedo and elaborate whiskers, drolly advising us to refresh the palate with "Schweppervescence." Only the magazine ads that employed "Men of Distinction" to tout a brand of whisky projected such class.
Cadbury Schweppes, veteran of least 20 acquisitions since 2000, now produces Dr. Pepper soft drinks and Dairy Milk chocolate but apparently has been off U.S. confectionery counters since 1988, except with brands licensed to Hershey Foods Corp. The Adams buy would boost its sales some $2 billion a year for a 26 percent share of global gum markets. Wrigley has 31 percent.
Non-users may be surprised (or even dismayed) to learn that chewing gum is projected as Europe's fastest-growing confection until 2005. While chocolate lost 2.6 percent of market share from 1996 to 2000, gum gained 7 percent. Consumers even on the continent of schnitzel, brie and torte apparently are cutting calories. Why the trend should end in 2005 isn't explained.
Maybe by then, Europeans will have seen gum chewed at weddings, graduations and funerals. Or being "cracked" in mouth! The habit has only been publicly discouraged in America, if memory serves, by old-fashioned schoolteachers. A student caught exercising the facial muscles in class either had to gulf quickly or place the wad on his or her nose.
A few months ago, Cadbury teamed up with an enemy, Switzerland's Nestle, in a $11.2 billion joint bid for Hershey. The public outcry in central Pennsylvania persuaded Hershey to back away fast. But that was an important fight. That was about chocolate. This is chewing gum. They can have it.
