Tupperware wants to get out of the Mad Men-era business of selling kitchen appliances like mixers and blenders. The company has spent more than $1 billion to acquire a number of the most iconic brand names in American home appliances.
Tupperware is going all-in like other companies are doing: it’s spending on advertising, buying up patents, and opening a manufacturing plant in China for high-tech machinery. The American company’s chairman and chief executive officer, David Zaslav, recently made the decision to spend up to $1 billion to buy the three-year-old company.
Tupperware is certainly not the first company to do a big buy-out. The most notable was the buyout of Heinz, when it went from being a private company to become a public company in 2008. But Zaslav said that he sees a future of doing smaller acquisitions and that he thinks this is the right thing to do. He told CBS in a recent interview that the company is on a path to become a global brand.
One reason for this is that Zaslav thinks that there is a real market for a company like Upperware. He said that he thinks what he does is not a niche product, but a product category as well.
“My view is that it’s more of a niche product,” he said. “We see the market as being broader than we originally thought it was.”
For this reason, he said that he plans to continue to buy companies that make a niche product category. He thinks that this move is likely to bring a lot of value. The company has taken so much money in equity, he said, that now he has no plans to sell the company for a large amount. Zaslav’s reasoning for doing this is that he wants to retain his personal equity (because he has the ability to reinvest in the company and make it grow) and because he wants to use the capital to buy more