Advertising: 0n Authenticity, ‘American Chopper’ and 1nvestments

A scene from "American Chopper." A Freedom Choppers Motorcycle Garage cuckoo clock is being marketed as "inspired by the hottest choppers and bike shops around"? September 1, 2014

Advertising

By STUART ELLIOTT

IT is time again to ask 20 questions about advertising, the media and popular culture.

■ Now that products are hoping to capitalize on the authenticity trend among consumers by marketing themselves as "Authentically delicious," will a cynic who remembers the vintage Automat ads that proclaimed "You can't eat atmosphere" start a countercampaign that declares, "You can't eat authenticity"?

■ Are the owners of the Orange County Choppers motorcycle garage or the creators of "American Chopper," the television series about them, familiar with a collectible item being sold by the Bradford Exchange called the Freedom Choppers Motorcycle Garage cuckoo clock, described in print and online ads as "inspired by the hottest choppers and bike shops around"?

■ Will some investors have second thoughts about the Wall Street acumen of Charles Schwab after reading an article about a new online dividend-research tool in the fall issue of the company's OnInvesting magazine that analyzes the dividend yield of "Proctor" & Gamble?

A scene from a "Friends" episode set in the "Central Perk" coffee shop. Warner Bros. is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the debut of the show with a pop-up store in New York inspired by the coffee shop.

■ Now that Sprint has ended its Framily plan and sidelined the Frobinsons, a cast of offbeat advertising characters that promoted the plan, does that render moot suggestions that Sprint sponsor a remake of a 1967 film and rename it "The Fraduate"?

■ With all the dark, menacing and ominous promotional commercials that CBS is running for "Stalker," a new series that has been described as the scariest drama the network has ever scheduled, will there be any viewers not frightened, disturbed or put off by the spots left to watch the premiere?

■ Was the gustatory headline in a magazine ad for the 2015 Cadillac Escalade, "Life tastes best when it's well done," inspired by the lines from the Blondie song "Rapture" about going "out at night eating cars/You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns, too, Mercurys and Subaru"?

■ Did anyone at Netflix suggest that because "House of Cards" was such a big hit that "Orange Is the New Black," which is set in a women's prison, ought to be titled "House of Guards"?

■ As Warner Bros. Television celebrates the 20th anniversary of the debut of "Friends" with a pop-up store in SoHo inspired by Central Perk, the coffee shop on the show, are executives kicking themselves for not licensing rights to open actual Central Perk stores, which had they drawn just some of the audience for the series during the last two decades might have given Starbucks a run for its beans?

■ Now that the Harry's website, which markets men's shaving merchandise, is selling a collection of products called the Truman Set, how long will it be before there is a Nixon Set, offering extra-sharp blades that fight five o'clock shadow?

■ Were the creators of an ad for Sferra linens, which carries the headline "Last night, I dreamt I was floating down the Grand Canal ...," familiar with the long-running campaign for Maidenform that carried headlines like "I dreamed I barged down the Nile in my Maidenform bra"?

■ Speaking of ads that echo vintage pitches, were the creators of an ad promoting South Carolina tourism, which carried the headline "Half the fun is getting there," familiar with the long-running campaign for Cunard that carried the theme "Getting there is half the fun"?

■ Were the readers of a recent issue of O: The Oprah Magazine confused when they saw an ad for Clarisonic cleansing devices carrying the headline "What's in the air may be aging you" and then saw, later in the same issue, an article carrying the headline "Love the age you are"?

■ Did the Tribune Media Services programming guide identify to Time Warner Cable viewers the 1994 version of "Miracle on 34th Street" as "sci-fi" because a Scrooge at the company did not believe the movie sufficiently made the case that Santa Claus is real?

■ Has the marketing department at MillerCoors considered hiring Crispin Porter & Bogusky to create campaigns for Crispin ciders?

■ If a proposed revival of the comedy series "Full House" comes to fruition, should Dannon Oikos Greek yogurt get a producer's credit because the brand reunited three principal cast members of the show during a Super Bowl ad in February?

■ Was Mr. Boodles, a proper British butler being introduced as the brand character for Boodles gin, created in a Madison Avenue version of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory by crossing Mr. Jenkins, the dapper roué who served as the brand mascot for Tanqueray gin, with Manners the butler, a long-ago spokescharacter for Kleenex napkins?

■ Would the Tom Cruise film "Edge of Tomorrow" have sold more tickets if the title had not implied that it was aimed at fans of vintage television daytime soaps like "The Edge of Night" and "Search for Tomorrow"?

■ Now that the actor Scott Foley is appearing in ads for Charisma towels, how long will it be before the actress Charisma Carpenter appears in ads for Scott towels?

■ How famished were viewers of an episode of "Justified" on the FX cable channel after watching three commercials in a row during a break, the first for the 24-foot-long buffet at CiCi's Pizza, the next for the $5 foot-long sandwiches at Subway and the final spot for Geico, in which the gecko visits Philadelphia and dances "the cheesesteak shuffle"?

■ Will someone whose work has been sent up, mocked or chided in this article dump a bucket of ice water on a reporter's head and tell him, "You ask a lot of questions for someone from Brooklyn"?

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Fast-Food Workers Seeking Higher Wages Plan Civil Disobedience

Demonstrators outside a McDonald's restaurant in New York in May. Fast-food workers seeking higher wages plan new strikes and demonstrations this week. By STEVEN GREENHOUSE September 1, 2014

The next round of strikes by fast-food workers demanding higher wages is scheduled for Thursday, and this time, labor organizers plan to increase the pressure by staging widespread civil disobedience and having thousands of home-care workers join the protests.

The organizers say fast-food workers — who are seeking a $15 hourly wage — will go on strike at restaurants in more than 100 cities and engage in sit-ins in more than a dozen cities.

But by having home-care workers join, workers and union leaders hope to expand their campaign into a broader movement.

"On Thursday, we are prepared to take arrests to show our commitment to the growing fight for $15," said Terrence Wise, a Burger King employee in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the fast-food workers' national organizing committee. At a convention that was held outside Chicago in July, 1,300 fast-food workers unanimously approved a resolution calling for civil disobedience as a way to step up pressure on the fast-food chains.

"They're going to use nonviolent civil disobedience as a way to call attention to what they're facing," said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has spent millions of dollars helping to underwrite the campaign. "They're invoking civil rights history to make the case that these jobs ought to be paid $15 and the companies ought to recognize a union."

Fast-food chains and many franchise operators have said that $15 an hour was unrealistic and would wipe out profit margins at many restaurants. Some business groups have attacked the campaign as an attempt by a fading union movement to rally a new group of workers.

Some franchise operators have dismissed the walkout, saying that in previous one-day strikes, only a handful of employees at their restaurants walked out, barely disrupting business. But organizers say that workers walked out at restaurants in 150 cities nationwide during the last one-day strike in May, closing several of them for part of the day, with solidarity protests held in 30 countries.

The S.E.I.U., which represents hundreds of thousands of health care workers and janitors, is encouraging home-care aides to march alongside the fast-food strikers. The union hopes that if thousands of the nation's approximately two million home-care aides join in it would put more pressure on cities and states to raise their minimum wage.

"They want to join," Ms. Henry said. "They think their jobs should be valued at $15."

S.E.I.U. officials are encouraging home-care aides to join protests in six cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Seattle. Union leaders say the hope is to expand to more cities in future strikes.

Jasmine Almodovar, who earns $9.50 an hour as a home-care aide in Cleveland, said the $350 she took home weekly was barely enough to support herself and her 11-year-old daughter. "I work very hard — I'm underpaid," she said. "We deserve a good life, too. We want to provide a nice future to our kids, but how can you provide a good life, how can you plan for the future, when you're scraping by day to day?"

Within the S.E.I.U., there has been some grumbling about why has the union spent millions of dollars to back the fast-food workers when they are not in the industries that the union has traditionally represented.

But Ms. Henry defended the strategy, saying that underwriting the fast-food push has helped persuade many people that $15 is a credible wage floor for many workers. She said it prompted Seattle to adopt a $15 minimum wage and that San Francisco was considering a similar move. She also said the campaign helped persuade the Los Angeles school district to sign a contract for 20,000 cafeteria workers, custodians and other service workers that will raise their pay, now often $8 or $9 an hour, to $15 by 2016.

"This movement has made the impossible seem more possible in people's minds," Ms. Henry said. "The home-care workers' joining will have a huge lift inside our union."

Correction: September 1, 2014

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect surname for a Burger King employee in Kansas City, Mo. He is Terrence Wise, not Hays.

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Yves Carcelle, Executive Who Made Louis Vuitton a Status Symbol, Dies at 66

Yves Carcelle in 2003. By NICOLA CLARK September 1, 2014

PARIS — Yves Carcelle, the charismatic executive who transformed Louis Vuitton from a staid French maker of handbags and travel trunks into one of the world's most iconic luxury brands, died Sunday in Paris. He was 66.

Carcelle died "following a long and courageous struggle with illness," LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the parent company of Louis Vuitton, said Monday in a statement. The cause was not specified, but French news media reported that Mr. Carcelle learned last year that he had kidney cancer.

Mr. Carcelle, who was promoted to the top post at the Louis Vuitton brand in 1990 and later ran LVMH's fashion division, was the main architect of an aggressive expansion into Asia and other international markets that elevated leather goods emblazoned with Louis Vuitton's distinctive LV logo into one of fashion's most recognizable status symbols.

In 1997, he gave the brand further impetus by recruiting Marc Jacobs to design shoes and ready-to-wear clothing for Louis Vuitton, which also added watches, jewelry and other accessories.

"He really gave his life to that place," Mr. Jacobs said Monday from New York. ''But while he knew it was a huge business and he was building it, he never forgot it was also something he enjoyed, and it was fun. And that made all the difference. I doubt we will see another man like that again."

In a statement confirming Mr. Carcelle's death, Bernard Arnault, the LVMH chairman, described Mr. Carcelle as a "tireless traveler" and a "pioneer" of the industry, who was "always curious, passionate and in motion."

Yves Carcelle's career at LVMH spanned more than two decades. He joined LVMH in 1989 as head of strategy, before becoming chairman and chief executive of its Louis Vuitton Malletier unit — as it was then called — in 1990. In 1998, he was put in charge of the LVMH Fashion Group, overseeing not just Louis Vuitton, but a stable of coveted brands including Loewe, Céline, Givenchy, Donna Karan, Kenzo, Berluti, Fendi and Thomas Pink. He stepped down as head of fashion in 2002 to focus exclusively on Louis Vuitton.

Under Mr. Carcelle's leadership, the number of LVMH boutiques doubled to 1,300 in more than 50 countries, while revenue soared almost tenfold to nearly 10 billion euros, or $13 billion. Louis Vuitton remains the French luxury giant's main source of revenue, accounting for more than two-thirds of the group's fashion and leather goods sales.

Before entering the glittering halls of LVMH, Mr. Carcelle — a mathematics major with degrees from France's elite École Polytechnique and from Insead business school — started his career in the somewhat less glamorous realms of household cleaning products and polyurethane foams for a series of companies at which he held various marketing and product management roles. He later worked with the Absorba clothing brand and was president of Descamps, a French maker of high-end household linens.

Mr. Carcelle retired from Louis Vuitton in 2012 and was succeeded by Jordi Constans, a Spanish businessman who resigned a month later for health reasons. Mr. Constans was replaced by Michael Burke, a French-American businessman and longtime LVMH executive, who remains in that role.

Until early this year, Mr. Carcelle had continued as vice president of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation — a multimillion-dollar, Frank Gehry-designed museum scheduled to open on the outskirts of Paris next month that will house LVMH's vast collection of contemporary art. He had also remained an adviser to Mr. Arnault and served on the board of the French luxury industry lobby, the Comité Colbert.

He was named a chevalier, or knight, of the Legion of Honor in 2004 for his contributions to French cultural life.

"He had this capacity of seeing the big picture while focusing on the smallest details," Mr. Arnault's son Antoine, who worked closely with Mr. Carcelle at Louis Vuitton, said in an email. "This perfect mix of left brain/right brain that is what you search for in top managers."

The younger Mr. Arnault, who is now chief executive of the Berluti brand, hailed Mr. Carcelle as "the most multifaceted manager I have ever met."

"His charm and charisma were unparalleled," Antoine Arnault said. "However, he was a fierce negotiator, and you didn't want to get in his way."

Mr. Carcelle is survived by his wife, Rebecca, and their two sons, as well as by three children from a previous marriage, Women's Wear Daily reported.

Vanessa Friedman contributed reporting from New York.

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Trade Duties Urged as New Deterrent Against Cybertheft

By DIANE CARDWELL September 1, 2014

In the daunting battle against international cybertheft, one major solar company wants to deploy a powerful and novel weapon: higher tariffs.

SolarWorld Americas, the largest manufacturer of solar panels in the United States, has asked the Commerce Department to investigate allegations that Chinese military personnel broke into the company's computers and stole documents important to its business and its long-running trade dispute with China.

The company's request followed the Justice Department's decision to prosecute five members of the People's Liberation Army, accusing them in May of stealing online files from a group of American companies, most of which had engaged in trade disputes with China.

SolarWorld says the new prosecution underscores the sophisticated ways that Chinese companies are retaliating against trade obstacles, especially the use of cyberwarfare.

As a deterrent, the company is proposing that the administration should use tariffs to crack down on such retribution.

"We think it is critically important that the Commerce Department set a precedent here and take a strong stand that it will not tolerate cyberhacking of U.S. companies that file trade cases," said Timothy C. Brightbill, a lawyer representing the solar company.

While acknowledging that the Justice Department is unlikely to be able to compel the accused hackers to appear in a United States courtroom, he said the federal government could impose additional steep tariffs on imports of Chinese solar panels. "This is a way that the U.S. could actually make it hurt," Mr. Brightbill said.

A broader investigation by the Commerce Department into the costs of solar panels divided the industry from its start. Domestic solar farm developers and installers of solar systems, whose businesses had benefited from an abundance of cheap imported equipment, worried that the passed-on costs of tariffs would slow solar adoption among consumers.

And American companies exporting polysilicon, the main raw material for solar products, to China feared that tariffs would make it harder for them to do business there. Indeed, China imposed steep duties on American polysilicon at the beginning of this year and recently tightened import policies on the material.

Still, many executives and officials have been frustrated in trying to hold Chinese companies accountable for what they see as unfair or unscrupulous business practices. A federal judge recently found a state-controlled Chinese drywall manufacturer, Taishan Gypsum Company, in criminal and civil contempt after it abruptly abandoned court proceedings five years into a case that found it liable for contaminated drywall used in the homes of seven Virginia families.

Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat from Florida, said he believed the implications of the case went far beyond drywall.

"It poses a defining moment for the Chinese government and its companies, which raises grave questions as to the risk of doing business with the Chinese," Senator Nelson said in July on the Senate floor. "Will the Chinese government and its companies honor their moral and legal obligations under this or any other commercial contract?"

In the case of cybercrime, corporations across many industries are frequently reluctant to cooperate with prosecutions, said Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike Services, a security technology and services company, and a former executive assistant director of the F.B.I. They worry that publicizing security breaches risks their reputation and erodes competitive advantages, as well as opening the door to lawsuits.

The threat of trade sanctions, Mr. Henry said, could offer the government a rare way to thwart hacking schemes before they happen.

"The value to the Chinese government and the companies that are benefiting from these thefts of intellectual property is in the billions of dollars, and the penalties or the risk is almost zero," he said. "There aren't any mechanisms to hold anyone accountable."

It is not clear how or if the Commerce Department will proceed; officials there declined to comment beyond saying that they were reviewing the request. Also uncertain is whether the White House, which is struggling to balance promoting the spread of green energy and protecting domestic manufacturing, would support the use of tariffs in such cases. A Justice Department spokesman, Marc Raimondi, said that the administration, "embraces an all-tools approach to these types of crimes."

"It's not just a criminal justice solution," Mr. Raimondi said. "There are a number of different tools that can be used to target this type of criminal activity."

Trade officials would first have to open an inquiry into how SolarWorld had been harmed and how the Chinese-owned solar companies — unnamed in the Justice Department indictment — had benefited, in order to impose additional duties on imports from those companies. If the Chinese government or companies decline to respond to information requests, the department can use other facts, including those presented by the other side in making a determination, trade lawyers said.

Even if the Commerce Department does not open an investigation, trade experts say, the SolarWorld request and the Justice Department indictment are bringing needed attention to a government that is more aggressive than others have been in trying to promote its industries.

"The Chinese have taken their efforts on behalf of their economy — and a lot of them are state-owned enterprises, a lot of them are state-supported — to a level that I think most people within the trade area haven't seen," said Paul C. Rosenthal, a lawyer at Kelley Drye in Washington, D.C. "It needs to be addressed, and there need to be better remedies available to address it."

SolarWorld Americas, the Oregon-based subsidiary of a German company, originally brought its trade case in 2011 as a flood of cheap solar panels from China was pushing several domestic manufacturers to the edge of bankruptcy and beyond. After the Commerce Department found that the Chinese companies had benefited from unfair subsidies from their government and were selling equipment below the cost of manufacture, it began imposing stiff tariffs on Chinese imports in May 2012.

According to the Justice Department, that is when a Chinese soldier sometimes known online as WinXYHappy and at least one co-conspirator began a series of break-ins into SolarWorld's computers to steal emails and attachments. Those included cash-flow records indicating SolarWorld's ability to survive financial strain, detailed information on proprietary technology and production costs and methods, as well as strategic discussions about the trade case with its lawyers.

But even though the duties cut into China's solar business, that first Commerce Department decision applied only to panels made from Chinese solar cells, the final major parts that are assembled into finished modules. Many companies were able to avoid the duties by assembling panels from cells produced elsewhere, especially in Taiwan, so last year SolarWorld brought a new case to close the loophole. Preliminary decisions have gone in the company's favor, and the United States started collecting amended tariffs on imports ranging from roughly 19 to 55 percent this summer.

The trade case is not yet final, but the new tariffs have begun reshaping the solar panel industry, helping SolarWorld and other manufacturers based outside China while also raising prices of equipment.

But trade relations between the two countries have frayed even farther. Foreign companies trying to do business in China have been facing new challenges as regulators and local government officials — apparently eager to impress the Communist Party leadership — appear to be aggressively enforcing the country's antimonopoly law.

The Chinese foreign and defense ministries have denied any wrongdoing and have accused the United States of cybertheft and spying activities of its own, pointing to revelations from Edward J. Snowden about National Security Agency activities around the world.

"The problem for the United States is that it's trying to promote this norm against industrial espionage — cybertheft of intellectual property — as distinct from traditional political or military espionage," said Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China studies and director of the digital and cyberspace policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's not an argument that many people bought even before Snowden, and now it's even harder to make."

Some analysts say that the issues facing the two countries require a political and economic, rather than legal, solution and are calling for a settlement between governments. China recently asked for a suspension of the tariffs along with talks toward an agreement, but that has not yet moved forward.

"Everyone's just going back and forth, tit-for-tat, on this," said Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business at Indiana University. "There needs to be some type of negotiation amongst all the parties and basically have a truce in the legal war and figure out what are the new rules of the game."

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Drone Developers Consider 0bstacles That Cannot Be Flown Around

By CONOR DOUGHERTY September 1, 2014

SAN FRANCISCO — The tech industry's enthusiasm for building small delivery drones may be getting ahead of figuring out what to do with them.

On Thursday, with much fanfare, Google revealed Project Wing, an experimental program out of the company's long-term projects division, called Google X. In a video, Google showed a buzzing aircraft — half plane, half helicopter — using a 200-foot fishing line to drop dog treats to a farmer in Queensland, Australia.

But for all the Tomorrowland wonder of a potential delivery-by-drone service, plenty of issues will be tricky to solve. Drone technology has not been thoroughly tested in populated areas, and commercial use of drones is not allowed in the United States. Even if it were, it is not clear that companies could make a profit using advanced, helicopterlike vehicles to deliver dog food, toothpaste or whatever else a modern family might need.

Still, dozens of companies have experimented with using drones for tasks like crop dusting and monitoring breaks in railroad tracks and oil pipelines. Late last year, Amazon revealed its own experimental delivery service, Prime Air, which it says could one day deliver packages to customers within a half-hour.

An experimental Google delivery drone in Queensland, Australia. Legal, social and financial hurdles for drone use remain.

And researchers at NASA are working on ways to manage that menagerie of low-flying aircraft. At NASA's Moffett Field, about four miles from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., the agency has been developing a drone traffic management program that would in effect be a separate air traffic control system for things that fly low to the ground — around 400 to 500 feet for most drones.

Much like the air traffic control system for conventional aircraft, the program would monitor the skies for weather and traffic. Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes.

The system would also make sure the drones do not run into buildings, news helicopters or other lower-flying objects — a more challenging task than for an airplane flying at 30,000 feet. There would also be no-fly zones, such as anywhere near a major airport.

"One at a time you can make them work and keep them safe," said Parimal H. Kopardekar, a NASA principal investigator who is developing and managing that program. "But when you have a number of them in operation in the same airspace, there is no infrastructure to support it."

Video | Amazon Prime Air Amazon released a video touting its Prime Air delivery service, which makes the use of drones.

Unlike the typical image of an air traffic control center — a dark room full of people wearing headphones and staring at radar screens — NASA's system, like the drones themselves, would dispense with the people and use computers and algorithms to figure out where they can and cannot fly.

The commercial viability of delivery drones would depend heavily on two things: how many people live in the area and how much people are willing to pay for the service.

Dr. Kopardekar said he expected the first commercial applications to be in agriculture and "asset monitoring," like keeping an eye on crops or remote oil pipelines.

"In agriculture, I'm hoping we will see some action inside of the next year," he said.

Over time — perhaps within five years — Dr. Kopardekar said he expected drones to make deliveries to sparsely populated areas, like rural Australia, where Google spent part of August delivering things like cattle vaccines and candy bars to a farmer.

Of course, the Federal Aviation Administration controls the skies in the United States, and it would have to sign off on any kind of drone management system. An F.A.A. spokesman said the agency expected to publish a proposed rule for small unmanned aircraft (less than 55 pounds) this year.

The F.A.A. prohibition on commercial drone use has not stopped photographers. Indeed, a video of the damage created by the recent earthquake in Napa, Calif., shot by a camera attached to a drone, was widely circulated over the Internet last week. And hobbyists do not need F.A.A. permission, so long as they don't endanger other "aircraft or people or property."

Google plans to spend the next year improving its drone's ability to navigate between two points, as well as its "detect and avoid" system, the network of sensors that keeps it from running into things, according to a spokeswoman. The company expects it to be "a few years but less than a decade" before people can realistically use it.

But for drones to make it into cities, the technology of delivery could end up taking a back seat to everything else.

"There is the technology piece and then there is the public acceptance piece, and both have to evolve," Dr. Kopardekar said. "If they are taken over by some rogue elements, how do you manage them? How do you have them safely land and take off in the presence of a grandma doing landscaping and kids playing soccer?"

This may explain why Domino's Pizza, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., sees a long future for human delivery drivers. Last year, after one of the pizza chain's British franchisees published a heavily shared video that showed a drone delivering pizza, there was much excitement about the prospect of pizza by drone. Sadly, that was a one-time publicity stunt.

"We did not and are not testing drone delivery," a Domino's spokesman, Tim McIntyre, wrote in an email. "Given the fact that these things have spinning blades, could be stolen, shot at or batted like piñatas, we didn't think the idea would 'fly' here in the U.S."

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DealBook: Heineken to Sell Mexican Packaging Unit to Crown Holdings

Photo Heineken, based in Amsterdam, is expected to recognize a gain of about $393.9 million following the sale.Credit Roslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Dutch brewer Heineken said on Monday that it had agreed to sell its Mexican packaging operations to Crown Holdings Inc. in a deal that valued the business at about $1.2 billion.

Selling the unit, Empaque, is part of Heineken's continuing effort to focus on brewing and marketing its beer brands and will provide the company with further financial flexibility, Heineken said. Its beer brands include Heineken, Amstel, Dos Equis and Sol.

Empaque, which is based in Monterrey, Mexico, produces metal beverage cans, glass bottles and other components used in beverage packaging. The company employs about 1,500 people at a variety of manufacturing facilities in Mexico.

The deal is expected to bolster the operations of Crown Holdings globally and in North America. By adding Empaque, Crown Holdings said it would be the second-largest beverage can producer in North America. It will produce more than 62 billion beverage cans a year worldwide.

The deal would also allow Crown Holdings to expand its presence in the growing Mexican market, John W. Conway, the chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Rexam is the world's largest beverage can producer.

Empaque is expected to remain an important supplier to Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, Heineken's Mexican subsidiary, Heineken said.

Heineken, based in Amsterdam, is expected to post a gain of 300 million euros, or about $394 million.

"We are confident that Empaque will flourish under its new ownership, and we look forward to our ongoing partnership," Jean-François van Boxmeer, the chairman and chief executive of Heineken, said in a statement.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval.

Heineken, one of the world's largest brewers, acquired Empaque in 2010 as part of its acquisition of the beer operations of Fomento Económico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V., known as Femsa, in an all share-transaction that valued that company at about $7.6 billion.

This year, Empaque is expected to post revenue of about $700 million and earnings before income tax, depreciation and amortization of about $150 million, according to Crown Holdings.

Formerly known as Crown Cork & Seal, Crown Holdings is one of the world's largest packaging companies. The company, based in Philadelphia, employs more than 21,300 people in 40 countries and had revenue of $8.7 billion in 2013.

Shares of Heineken rose slightly, to €58.12, in morning trading in Amsterdam on Monday, while shares of Crown Holdings closed up less than 1 percent, at $48.27, in trading in New York on Friday.

Markets in the United States are closed on Monday for the Labor Day holiday.

Heineken was advised by the investment bank Moelis & Company and the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, while Crown Holdings was advised by Citigroup.

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DealBook: Heineken to Sell Packaging 0perations in Mexico to Crown Holdings

LONDON — The Dutch brewer Heineken said on Monday that it had agreed to sell its Mexican packaging operations to Crown Holdings Inc. in a deal that values the business at about $1.23 billion.

Selling Empaque is part of Heineken's continuing efforts to focus its resources primarily on the brewing and marketing of its beer brands and will provide it with further financial flexibility, the company said. Its beer brands include Heineken, Amstel, Dos Equis and Sol.

Empaque, which is based in Monterrey, Mexico, produces metal beverage cans, glass bottles and other components used in beverage packaging. The company employs about 1,500 people at a variety of manufacturing facilities in Mexico.

The deal is expected to boost the operations of Crown Holdings globally and in North America. The company said it expected to become the second-largest beverage can producer in North America and to account for 20 percent of all beverage cans globally, supplying more than 62 billion cans a year.

The deal will also allow Crown Holdings to expand its presence in the growing Mexican market, John W. Conway, the Crown Holdings chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Empaque is expected to remain a key supplier to Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, Heineken's Mexican subsidiary, following the transaction, Heineken said.

Heineken, based in Amsterdam, is expected to recognize a gain of 300 million euros, or about $393.9 million, following the sale.

"We are confident that Empaque will flourish under its new ownership and we look forward to our ongoing partnership," Jean-François van Boxmeer, the chairman and chief executive of Heineken, said in a statement.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval.

Heineken, one of the world's largest brewers, acquired Empaque in 2010 as part of its acquisition of the beer operations of Fomento Económico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V. in an all share-transaction that valued Femsa's brewing and packaging businesses at about $7.6 billion.

This year, Empaque is expected to post sales of about $700 million and earnings before income tax depreciation and amortization of about $150 million, according to Crown Holdings.

Crown, formerly known as Crown Cork & Seal, is one of the world's largest packaging companies. The company, based in Philadelphia, employs more than 21,300 people in 40 countries worldwide and posted sales of $8.7 billion in 2013.

Shares of Heineken rose slightly to €58.12 in morning trading in Amsterdam on Monday, while shares of Crown Holdings closed up less than one percent at $48.27 in trading in New York on Friday.

Markets in the United States are closed on Monday for the Labor Day holiday.

Heineken was advised by the investment bank Moelis & Company and the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, while Crown Holdings was advised by Citigroup.

source : http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640316/s/3e07ced4/sc/30/l/0Ldealbook0Bnytimes0N0C20A140C0A90C0A10Cheineken0Eto0Esell0Epackaging0Eoperations0Ein0Emexico0Eto0Ecrown0Eholdings0C0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm