Grand Metropolitan

The issue: Grand Metropolitan PLC is the world’s largest wine and spirits seller. It mainly operated in London, USA. In 1991, it beats market expectation with a 4.8% increase in pretax profits, and the company Chairman stated that company’s goal “to constantly improve on”. Despite the great performance in the world recession in 1991, the price of GrandMet shares was 10% below the average price/earnings ratio of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. And more important, rumors had that

The issue: Grand Metropolitan PLC is the world’s largest wine and spirits seller. It mainly operated in London, USA. In 1991, it beats market expectation with a 4.8% increase in pretax profits, and the company Chairman stated that company’s goal “to constantly improve on”. Despite the great performance in the world recession in 1991, the price of GrandMet shares was 10% below the average price/earnings ratio of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. And more important, rumors had that

Born in 1997, Diageo was a product of merger between Guinness and Grand Metropolitan. Guinness and Grand Metropolitan were also products of mergers. Guinness acquired Distillers in 1986 and Grand Metropolitan had expanded from its roots as a hotel business into spirits, Pillsbury, Burger King and various pubs. After the merger, Diageo’s new CEO, John McGrath and executive teams had a vision to create a more focused strategy, concentrating on their core strengths, and integrate the company fully

about the capital structure policies Diageo has pursued in the past. Do they make sense? How does it compare to Diageo’s competitors’ policies? Which competitors would make for the best comparison? (40%) Diageo was formed from the merger of Grand Metropolitan plc and Guinness plc. Before the merge, both companies used little debt (based on the book D/E ratio and net debt to total capital in the table below) to finance themselves which helped them gain and maintain high credit rating (A and AA respectively)

The predecessor to Burger King was founded in 1953 in Jacksonville, Florida, as Insta-Burger King. After visiting the McDonald brothers' original store location in San Bernardino, California, the founders and owners (Keith J. Kramer and his wife's uncle Matthew Burns), who had purchased the rights to two pieces of equipment called "Insta-machines", opened their first restaurants. Their production model was based on one of the machines they had acquired, an oven called the "Insta-Broiler". This strategy

9 - 2 0 1- 0 3 3 REV. AUGUST 6, 2003 GEORGE CHACKO PETER TUFANO Diageo plc Ian Cray, Diageo plc’s Treasurer, looked out of his office window onto the busy streets of London in October 2000. The London-based consumer goods company Diageo had recently announced its intention to sell its packaged food subsidiary, Pillsbury, to General Mills. Earlier in the year, Diageo also announced its intent to sell 20% of its Burger King subsidiary through an initial public offering during 2001, to

Executive Summary Grand Metropolitan is a multi-industry company that originally operated in hospitality industry but later expanded into food and beverage. The firm later focuses on the latter industry. Due to the economic growth in developing countries, Grand Metropolitan has the opportunity to expand their target markets abroad. However, political and social factors pose some threats to the company to reach their potential revenue. The company’s strengths include the firm infrastructure, procurements

neighborhoods drive some people away from certain areas, leading them to aggregate in other specified areas. At a local scale, segregation seems almost non-existent and individual choice bears no significant burden of the neighborhood; however, at a grand scale, similar preferences that are shared across large groups of people tend to be the outlying cause for the large patterns of segregation between non-Hispanic white people and other minority races. Dissimilarity is a measurement

Inspiration, idealistic, caustic, unorthodox, assertive, ambiguous, Gustav Mahler has astonished the world with symphonies ranging in violence to tenderness throughout the 20th century. During an era of musical progression in fin-de-siécle, an anxious mood, Mahler, a conductor and composer, took an inherent stance in composition. Even though much of his musical works weren’t popular until 40 years after his death, the discovery of his ingenious talents were unparalleled to other composers of that

In Warren W. Wiersbe’s book 50 People Every Christian Should Know Wiersbe says that “Perhaps one of the highest compliments anyone could pay a preacher would be to say that he preaches like Spurgeon.” Spurgeon is well respected for his powerful, moving, and God honoring sermons that he preached. Spurgeon is also known for the Church he had in London. When Charles Spurgeon would preach to people he would be called a many-sided individual. (Wiersbe141) This could mean Spurgeon was very practical from