Cadbury

Agnelli family’s Exor deals risk with GEDI but reward with Fiat Chrysler

The completion of the Agnelli family’s €104.2 million ($121 million) buy back of control of GEDI from the De Benedetti family came at a fortuitous time as Italy’s largest editorial group suffers in the first half of the year of the coronavirus.

If you stick around long enough, most things will come back into fashion. Until recently, the family-owned firm with a religious ethos would be regarded in fashionable western business schools as vaguely 19th century, conjuring images of earnest Quakers in sober attire, building model villages and fretting over the character of the working man.

We can only speculate as to the real reasons the Ferrero family abandoned its consortium bid for the UK's Cadbury for at least the second time in a decade, write Ben Harper and Shonali Sashikant. 

The proud third-generation Italian business, with a turnover of €6.2 billion and a string of industry awards to its name, recently shocked the business community with its sudden withdrawal in the high profile battle against, amongst others, the US goliath Kraft.

Family-owned Ferrero, the Italy-based chocolate maker, has decided not to proceed with a bid for UK confectionary company Cadbury, according to media reports this morning. 

The decision was made by Michele Ferrero, the group's chairman and family patriarch, people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times. It is understood Michele Ferrero believed going forward with the bid would create too much debt for the company.