New owner for Weetabix

Chinese Bright Food sold cereal manufacturer Weetabix to American Post Holdings, which will now obtain 60 % of the company. The remaining 40 % are in the hands of Chinese investment firm Baring Private Equity Asia.

Chinese joint venture

Post Holdings will pay 1.4 billion pounds (1.7 billion euro) to acquire Weetabix, a company Bright Food was invested in since 2012. Back then, the Chinese acquired 60 % of the cereal company’s shares from investment firm Lion Capital in the hopes that the British cereal brand would become popular in China, which never happened.

Post Holdings and Bright Food, alongside an investment fund, will create a joint venture to manage Weetabix’ Chinese operations.

Founded in the United Kingdom, Weetabix is currently available in more than ninety countries. Nevertheless, most of its turnover still comes from the United Kingdom and its performance last year was not very good: turnover dropped 1.6 % and profit even slumped 15 % to 84.6 million pounds (slightly more than 100 million euro).