Healthy breakthrough for Pepsi. The American soft drink giant – Coca Cola's archenemy – wants to buy SodaStream, an Israeli company that produces a device for making ordinary tap water carbonated. The courtship began in 2015 and yesterday it turned into a maxi-offer of 3,2 billion dollars.
The deal calls for PepsiCo to pay $144 for each share of SodaStream, listed on the Nasdaq in November 2010. Price incorporates an 11% bonus compared to last Friday's stock market close. The transaction is expected to close within a few months, at the latest in early 2019.
How can this choice be explained? Today, on average, consumers are more health conscious than in the past, so purchases of hyper-sweetened or processed drinks tend to decrease. Acquiring the flagship company of "homemade sodas" would allow Pepsi to at least partially offset this decline, making its way into a new market segment.
From SodaStream's point of view, however, the agreement represents the possibility of expanding the business worldwide. At present, the Israeli company distributes its products – not only siphons for adding bubbles to water, but also over 100 types of syrups for flavoring it – in 45 countries, for a total of 80 points of sale concentrated mainly in Germany, France , Canada and the United States.
Until 2015, the main plant was in the West Bank and the company employed hundreds of Palestinians. But then a strong boycott campaign forced the company to close the factory in Ma'ale Adumim. The Palestinians in contact were thus reduced to about seventy. Today SodaStream is headquartered in Lod, near Ben Gurion Airport, and has 13 manufacturing plants in Israel.
