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Companies and Brands

Tobacco M&A: Where Is Phillip Morris (MO)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The company’s slogan used to be "Call for Phillip Morris". Well, tobacco mergers and acquisitions are heating up and the world’s largest company is silent.

Imperial Tobacco (ITY) has already bought US cigarette company Commonwealth Brands, and is now making a  $15 billion plus run at Spanish smokes company Altadis. Earlier this year, Japan Tobacco made a bid for cigarette company Gallaher Group (GLH).

Now that Phillip Morris parent Altria (MO) is spinning off its Kraft (KFT) food business, it would seem that it would want to enhance its presence in the global tobacco industry. It is already the largest tobacco company in the world, and its international business is much larger than its revenue in the US.

And Altria has the market cap to buy virtually any rival. British Tobacco’s market cap is $29 billion. Altria’s is $178 billion.

Wall St. should not be surprised if Altria does become aggressive in the tobacco M&A market. It may allow some consolidation among smaller companies. But, if investors open the morning paper some day and see that MO has made a bid for Imperial Tobacco, no one should be surprised.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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