Content area
Full text
Resisting Hostile Takeovers: The Case of Gillette. By Rita RicardoCampbell Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1997. x + 254 pp. Bibliography and index. $65.00 ISBN 0275958302.
Reviewed by Charles W Cheape
As an outside director of the Gillette Company and a Ph.D. economist, Rita Ricardo-Campbell narrates a valuable case study of the hostile corporate takeovers in the 1980s. At that time, Gillette was an experienced, successful, and well-managed enterprise. Building on its development of the safety razor business early in this century, the company became a diversified multinational concern with plants in over twenty countries and profitable complementary product lines, including (in addition to the core razor and blades business) toiletries and cosmetics, writing pens, Braun electric razors, and Oral-B electric toothbrushes. During the 1980s stockholder return grew twice as fast as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Standard & Poors 500 Index, while annual operating profits nearly tripled to $664 million on sales of $3.8 billion between 1986 and 1989.
Yet in that same period Gillette only narrowly escaped four hostile takeover attempts. In 1986-87 Ronald Perelman, an "entrepreneur-type raider" (p. 25) who had already seized Technicolor and the Revlon Group, made three attacks on the firm. His operations compelled the enterprise to spend $558 million...