The New Face of a Global Economy

Several products, businesses and landmarks presumed to be as American as hot dogs and apple pie are in fact owned by companies in Europe, Asia or elsewhere.

Shuanghui, based in Hong Kong, bought Smithfield for $4.72 billion in a deal that has drawn scrutiny from senior members of Congress in both U.S. political parties, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, and Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, who had asked for a “thorough review” of the plan.



This is not 1980s America. Today’s emerging markets are using taking a different approach than Japan did, which brought home-grown technology to the United States market to sell. They came with Nintendos and Nissans, products that already had a name for themselves back home. Companies are now testing the waters by buying good U.S. brands first and they’re buying them cheap. Not always a bad thing.

'The Chinese government, ruled under Communism, actively supports the rush to acquire assets overseas, especially natural resources. Over the past decade, China’s capital outflow has grown ten-fold to around $62 billion.
Given China’s $3.5 trillion in reserves, many economists figure China will be investing as much as $500 billion overseas in seven years.'

'If Made in China characterized the past 20 years, says Kumar, then Owned by China may characterize the next. Buying up brands is an important part of that story.'
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/27/the-foreign-companies-that-are-buying-up-america/

Some more familiar companies and landmarks below:

VASELINE
Back in 1872, a named Robert Chesebrough invented a petroleum jelly that he patented as Vaseline. The product was used as an antiseptic during World War II, and eventually became the top producer of petroleum jelly in the US. In 1987, its parent company was bought by British/Dutch monolith, Unilever N.V.

BEN & JERRY'S
Founded in 1978 by fun-loving hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in Burlington, Vermont, Ben & Jerry's and their funky flavors--Cherry Garcia! ChubbyHubby!--is an American institution. But thirteen years ago, it, too, was acquired by Unilever, the British/Dutch company.

GERBER
The "Gerber" baby is almost as famous as the baby food of the same name. Founded by the Fremont Canning Company in Fremont, Mich., in 1927, the company eventually became part of Swiss pharmaceutical company, Novartis. Today, Gerber owns more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for baby food.

PURINA
In 1894, Wiliam H. Danforth of St. Louis launched an animal feed company. More than 100 years later, Purina still produces a range of dog and cat food. But it's no longer American-owned. In 2001, Nestle, a Swiss company, lapped it up.

ALKA-SELTZER
Americans of a certain age remember the "plop plop fizz fizz" sound touted in ads for the effervescent antacid and pain reliever. The magic tablets were developed in 1884 by Maurice Treener, the head chemist at the Dr. Miles Medical Company in Elkhart, Ind. It is now owned by Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company that operates multiple sites in the United States.

JOHN HANCOCK LIFE INSURANCE
Never mind John Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence, a decidedly American artifact. John Hancock Life Insurance, which dates back to 1862, was bought in 2004 by Manulife Financial, a Canadian insurance company headquartered in Toronto.

IBM THINKPAD
Never mind the "IBM" before the product name: The line of laptop computers and tablets is owned by Lenovo, a Chinese company that bought IBM's personal computer business in 2005 for $1.75 billion.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/iconic-american-brands-foreign-owned/story?id=19291042


AMC THEATERS
Wang Jianlin, the Chinese billionaire best known in the U.S. for his purchase of the AMC movie theatre chain last year, has become China’s richest man, based on a new Forbes estimate.


BUDWEISER (MILLER AND COORS TOO) See the list here http://www.drinkamerican.us/faq/59-who-owns-what-beers.html
Is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD), a Belgian and Brazilian company with headquarters in Leuven, Belgium. Its U.S. operations include a dozen breweries plus hops farms, malt plants, barley elevators and a rice mill.

GOOD HUMOR / BREYERS
In 1961, Thomas J. Lipton acquired it. The company's parent, Unilever (UL), a British-Dutch multinational company, merged Good Humor with its other ice cream brands, Breyers, Klondike Bar and Popsicle, in 1993.

7-ELEVEN STORES
Perhaps no convenience store chain is better known among Americans than 7-Eleven, originator of the Slurpee and the Big Gulp. It operates more than 7,000 stores throughout the country.
It operates nearly twice that many in Japan, home of Seven & I, the Tokyo company that now owns the U.S. chain.

FIRESTONE
Harvey Firestone founded his tire company in 1900 in Akron, Ohio. Firestone Tire and Rubber hit the big time a few years later when it became the exclusive supplier of tires to Ford Motor (F), and for decades, it was profitable. The company fell on hard times in 1979 and was sold in 1988 to Bridgestone (BRDCY) in Japan.

FRIGIDAIRE
Frigidaire was founded in 1918 in Fort Wayne, Ind. Anyone who wants to know why it's a classic American brand need look no further than the song "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town," (see the lyrics here) in which it's mentioned by name by singer Ray Charles. The company was owned by General Motors (GM) from 1919 until 1979, when it was sold to White Sewing. Seven years later, White Sewing, along with Frigidaire, was sold to Electrolux (ELUXY), the Swedish appliance company.

THE CHRYSLER BUILDING
The Chrysler Building is one of the landmarks of the Manhattan skyline. Located on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, it's New York's third-tallest building and a towering tribute to both Chrysler and the city that it calls home. The Art Deco building has had two foreign owners in the last 11 years. TNW, a German investment group, bought a 75% stake for $300 million in 2001. Seven years later, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council bought it, and now owns 90% of the building.

HOLIDAY INN
The first Holiday Inn opened in 1952 in Memphis, Tenn. and took its name from the 1942 Bing Crosby film of the same name. Its uniquely lettered, curved sign that bore the company logo soon became a fixture of America's highways. And although it was phased out in the 1980s, it remains a memorable part of the U.S. landscape. In 1988, Holiday Inn was purchased by Bass, a U.K. company. Today, it's owned by InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) in the U.K. and operates 1,315 U.S. hotels with a total of 240,025 rooms.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48216485