A n d r e w s G u m W o r l d

As AndrewsGumWorld (and the whole world) knows right now, the economy is tough and businesses (especially financial institutions) are struggling, but according to an analysis earlier today on TradingMarkets.com, Casey’s General Stores have beat that trend, in part, by relying on some familiar standbies, including chewing gum:

Casey’s General Stores, Inc. (CASY) is proving that even when the economy slows, consumers will still pull over to purchase such novelties as chewing gum and fountain soda. The company’s share price has been rallying since mid July.

Casey General Stores, Inc. operates 1,468 convenience stores in the Midwest. The company was founded in 1959, has a market cap of $1.55 billion and is headquartered in Ankeny, Iowa.

First-Quarter Results

Casey’s stepped up and delivered solid first-quarter results on Sep 3, demonstrating the company’s ability to weather a choppy economy. Revenue increased 22% from last year to $1.57 billion.

IMAGE: Financial Times

We’ll readily acknowledge that AndrewsGumWorld is not Jeopardy, but we’ll pretend, for a moment, that we are.

Question: How did Warren Buffett begin his journey towards becoming the second richest man in America?

Last week, the Financial Times began a series of articles about Warren Buffett (as well as a link to a review of his biography, “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life”), and we were nothing less than pleased to discover that his fabulous success in the world of business began quite simply, and that his first profits were made from selling our favorite brand of gum:

The first few cents Warren Buffett ever earned came from selling packs of chewing gum. And from the day he started selling – at six years of age – he showed an unyielding attitude toward his customers that revealed much about his later style.

“I had this little green tray, which had five different areas in it. I’m pretty sure my aunt Edie gave me that. It had containers for five different brands of gum, Juicy Fruit, Spearmint, Doublemint, and so on. I would buy packs of gum from my grandfather and go around door to door in the neighborhood selling this stuff. I used to do that in the evening, largely.

“I remember a woman named Virginia Macoubrie saying, ‘I’ll take one stick of Juicy Fruit.’ I said, ’We don’t break up packs of gum’ – I mean, I’ve got my principles. I still, to this day, remember Mrs Macoubrie saying she wanted one stick. No, they were sold only in five-stick packs. They were a nickel, and she wanted to spend a penny with me.”

Making a sale was tempting, but not tempting enough to change his mind. If he sold one stick to Virginia Macoubrie, he would have four sticks left to sell to somebody else, not worth the work or the risk. From each whole pack, he made two cents profit. He could hold those pennies, weighty and solid, in his palm.

 Today’s Punch, which is Nigeria’s most widely read newspaper, reported on Cadbury Nigeria Plc’s introduction of Stimorol chewing gum to its product line-up, the first chewing gum to locally produced in that country.

The company’s managing director, Wallace Garland, sees the local production of the gum as a significant step for his company, which faced a significant financial and management crisis two years ago:

“This is the start of a turning point. Cadbury, as we all know, has been through a couple of difficult years. What I can tell you is that in the background very quietly without making a lot of noise in the press we have been working hard putting our business together after the shock that we came to understand two years ago.“We are much stronger than we were, we have a much better knowledge of the business than we had two years ago and we are building our strength to come and jump back to where we thought we were two years ago and I can confidently tell you that we will be there. It might take us a while but I can tell you that we will be there”.

Wrigley Building in Fog, originally uploaded by spudart.

The three “R”s. Reading, ‘Righting, and ‘Rigley’s.,

originally uploaded by Hamlet Haoi.

 As AndrewsGumWorld has talked about before, Wrigley, the company that makes the Official Gum™ of Gum Guy has now been sold to Mars, as this morning Chicago Tribune reports:

Shareholders of Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. on Thursday approved the sale of the company to Mars Inc., a $23 billion transaction that will end the independence of one of Chicago’s most venerable companies.

The deal is expected to close within two weeks, when Wrigley will become part of privately held Mars, creating the world’s biggest confectionary company. Wrigley, whose shares have been publicly traded since 1923, will remain based in Chicago as a subsidiary of Virginia-based Mars. The combined company will have the Mars name, but Wrigley’s brand and top management are expected to remain in place.

William Wrigley Jr., the company’s chairman, told shareholders that the benefits of the deal “have become even more striking” given what has happened in financial markets since late April, when Mars’ offer was unveiled.

Wrigley shareholders will receive $80 per share, a 28 percent premium over where the stock was trading before the deal was announced. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor’s 500 has fallen 13 percent in that time.

Wrigley, great-grandson of the man who founded the gum giant in the 1890s, said he expects the deal will close around Oct. 6.

 William Bothwell’s (that’s him above) “Angles ’n’ Attitudes” in Ontario’s Orangeville Citizen newspaper recently took on the subject of chewing gum in a column titled “A sticky business” (AndrewsGumWorld has noted before that puns run rampant in gum reporting in the media).

Bothwell is, perhaps, arguably a gum curmudgeon, as the opening lines of his editorial below will note, but he also managed to fit, in one column, details on everything from new antioxidant-laden Bonus gum (reported on earlier here), the Alamo, Mexican General Santa Ana’s banishment to Staten Island, gum flavors, Thomas Adams and his role in the invention of gum, the introduction of pepsin powders to gum and the creation of “dentyne” gum, the Greeks, Socrates and more. The entire piece is, truly, an education in the history (past and current) of chewing gum. Check it out, including these opening lines:

 This writer has eschewed chewing gum for longer than he can remember. It is an abstinence to which he intends to stick. One remembers how, coming in from recess at school, it was not unknown to stick a wad of gum under the desk to await future use. Sometimes it remained there until summer holidays came. By then its ‘best-before’ date was long past and the custodians had extra work to do.

All of our teachers thought that if we concentrated on the assigned work we would have neither thought nor need for gum. None of us was as yet able to argue that chewing something other than the tip of a pencil might aid concentration, reduce the stress of the teacherpupil relationship and facilitate the learning process. Anyway, nobody that I can remember was ready in Runnymede Public School to argue with Miss Scott or Mr Hambly. They, by the way, eventually married and, one assumes, had their own tensions to contend with.

Warwick International, based in Mostyn, UK, has just been sold to its management team for £129 million (US$230 million), according to today’s Evening Leader from Mold.

It’s a make or break deal for the company’s employees in Flintshire. Warwick is a company best known for two businesses; one, perhaps of less interest to those who work at (and read) AndrewsGumWorld is its international laundry detergent business.

Second, though, is its more intriguing collaboration with Revolymer, reported on earlier today in AndrewsGumWorld and referenced in this article:

Revolutionary ‘non-stick’ chewing gum has been developed at research labs at the Mostyn site, alongside Bristol-based research company Revolymer.

Scientists hope the gum will keep its taste for longer and be easily removed from pavements, and it is anticipated a £10m funding boost could bring the new product to market next year.

Poland’s Puls Biznesu reports that Wrigley, which already operates one of the largest plants in Europe in Poznan (the city is pictured above). As reported today from anonymous sources, Wrigley plans to make a major investment which will expand jobs and the financial resources that it pours into some of the economic zones of Poland (as well as potential plans for Russia, too).

Here are some of the details reported in today’s article:

The leader on the Polish chewing gum market which is worth PLN 797m [US$345 million), wants to increase its capacity in Europe.

“The company considers developing its Poznan plant and buying new production lines. This is a PLN 170m [US$73.5 million] project which would create 300 new jobs”, “PB” anonymous source said.