I recently finished reading Barbarians at the Gate – The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. This book has been on my reading list for quite some time, and I finally (and very gladly) was able to read it.
First on the merger of Standard Brands and Nabisco:
Nevertheless, Johnson was intrigued. He got together with Schaeberle and liked the man. In a matter of weeks the two executives agreed to merge their companies. Nabisco Brands, as the new company would be called, was formed in a $1.9 billion stock swap in 1981, at the time one of the larger mergers of consumer-product companies. Technically, it was a marriage of equals. But that was considered so much chin music. Everyone knew Nabisco, with dominant brands such as Ritz and Oreo, was the more powerful company. Everyone knew who would be in charge.
And the ascent of Ross Johnson to the top position of the combined entity:
As the smoke cleared, Johnson emerged triumphant, both inside and outside Nabisco. As far as Schaeberle and the board were concerned, he could do no wrong. That year Schaeberle rewarded Johnson by ceding him the title of chief executive. Nabisco’s huge new research center was about to be unveiled, and Johnson, in a spasm of flattery, repaid the favor by naming it the Robert M. Schaeberle Technology Center. Schaeberle was moved. The Merry Men thought it was a brilliant way to put Schaeberle out to pasture. A man who lad his name on a building, they reasoned, might as well be dead.
Despite the increased scope of responsibilities and breadth of company activities Johnson was already thinking beyond Nabisco brands:
If Johnson grew indifferent toward Nabisco, it was because he could no longer see much of a future in it. The cookie wars has changed his thinking; he regarded the battle with Frito-Lay and P&G not as a final victory, but as the successful deflection of a shot fired across his bow. There would be another giant like Procter & Gamble—maybe even P&G itself—that would come after him again. Nabisco, after all, had fatal weaknesses. No amount of work was going to revitalize its aging bakeries anytime soon. Johnson, in fact, never bothered to formulate any kind of master plan for reshaping Nabisco. Years of scrambling had soured him on long-range planning. Instead he spent his time enjoying the high life, putting out corporate fires as they flared, and waiting. Someone had once codified the Standard Brands culture into twenty Johnsonisms. Number thirteen was “Recognize that ultimate success comes from opportunistic, bold moves which, by definition, cannot be planned.” On a spring day in 1985, less than a year after being tapped Nabisco’s chief, Johnson took a call from J. Tylee Wilson, chairman and chief executive officer of RJ Reynolds Industries, the North Carolina-based tobacco giant. Would Johnson be interested in getting together for lunch? Maybe, Wilson said, they could do some business.
On a parallel, Reynolds was thriving and generating more cash than it knew what to do with:
Life was good then. Reynolds’s Winston, Salem, and Camel were three of the top four bestselling cigarette brands. Prince Albert remained the top-selling pipe tobacco, and a brand called Days Work was the top chewing tobacco. Americans were smoking like chimneys. In 1960, 58 percent of all men and 36 percent of all women smoked. It was often said that Reynolds’s only problem was how to turn out cigarettes fast enough and how to ship all that money back to Wachovia Bank. In one respect, it was true. From a corporate executive’s point of view, Reynolds had too much cash on its hands. In 1956 the company amended its charter to allow it for the first time to buy nontobacco businesses.
Thus came the idea of merging the two businesses:
The talks, in fact, rekindled within weeks. A small army of Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers were brought in, and, the directors having been convinced, Reynolds agreed in principle to acquire Nabisco for cash. The lone sticking point was the price. Then, during the negotiations, Nabisco stock began rising, a sure sign that word of the talks had leaked. Johnson took it as an opportunity to wheedle more money out of Wilson. At $80 a share, Wilson said he could go no further. “Well,” Johnson said, “you’re not gonna get a deal at eighty bucks.” The logjam broke when Wilson agreed to throw in preferred stock, which brought the price to $85 a share, or $4.9 billion, at the time the largest merger ever to take place outside the oil industry.
Despite the fact that the anti-tobacco lawsuits were being settled for lower than expected amounts, RJR Nabisco’s stock was not moving up as expected, thus further persuading Johnson of the idea that a leveraged LBO is the way to unlock the true value that exists within the company:
The case mounted by Anthony Cipollone was considered among the strongest ever brought against the tobacco industry; the plaintiff’s lawyers had unearthed a raft of damaging documents. A tobacco victory, Johnson reasoned, would give his stock a real pop. When the jury finally delivered a verdict, it broke tobacco’s unbeaten streak—but just barely, clearing the industry of conspiracy and awarding only $400,000 in damages. “A tip for Tony Cipollone,” Johnson chortled, and waited for RJR Nabisco’s stock to spike up. It didn’t. Johnson’s office became a wailing wall where everybody came to cry about the injustice of it all. Horrigan was particularly bitter; he had predicted the stock would climb at least six points. “The market never going to give us its due,” Henderson complained. “The equity markets just aren’t a suitable capital structure for some companies.” Arguing to take stock from public hands was in fact the intellectual basis for an LBO, although no one openly advocated it at the time. Horrigan thought Johnson would never go private. “The problem with the company going private,” he said to himself, “is that nobody would pay any attention to him.”
The time was ripe for LBO’s, and the reasons:
In the five years before Ross Johnson decided to pursue his buyout, LBO activity totaled $181.9 billion, compared to $11 billion in the six years before that. A number of factors combined to fan the frenzy. The Internal Revenue Code, by making interest but not dividends deductible from taxable income, in effect subsidized the trend. That got LBOs off the ground. What made them soar was junk bonds. Of the money raised for any LBO, about 60 percent, the secured debt, comes in the form of loans from commercial banks. Only about 10 percent comes from the buyer itself For years the remaining 30 percent—the meat in the sandwich—came from a handful of major insurance companies whose commitments sometimes took months to obtain. Then, in the mid-eighties, Drexel Burnham began using high-risk “junk” bonds to replace the insurance company funds. The firm’s bond czar, Michael Milken, had proven his ability to raise enormous amounts of these securities on a moment’s notice for hostile takeovers. Pumped into buyouts, Milken’s junk bonds became a high-octane fuel that transformed the LBO industry from a Volkswagen Beetle into a monstrous drag racer belching smoke and fire.
As the bankers got involved in the process, Johnson could feel that he was losing control of the company, and that everyone was in it to grab a share of profits for themselves:
Johnson remained in his office, shocked at the turn in events. He couldn’t talk to Gutfreund or Cohen; they seemed too pleased at laving shown Kravis the price of messing with them. He couldn’t talk to Kravis, who, in Johnson’s words, was “pissing fire.” Just seventeen hours earlier, he had managed to get a peace treaty. He hadn’t wanted to invite Strauss or Cohen or any of the Wall Streeters. The whole thing had fallen apart over greed—pure and simple greed. And now, the piece de resistance, his own partners were launching a $20 billion bid without even bothering to tell him. He felt like the man who entered the casino in a tuxedo one night and emerged the next morning in rags. Far worse, Johnson realized, he had lost all control of his fate…Everyone, he reflected, was out to get something for themselves. The directors, with their petty concerns about pensions and auto insurance. Kravis and his investment bankers and their fees. Salomon and its bonds. And now Frank Benevento wanted $24 million. There was no bloody way Benevento was getting anywhere near $24 million, Johnson thought. He told him to bill the company for whatever he wished. The matter would be dealt with when things returned to normal.
The media quickly paid attention to this, and this also affected the employees productivity during that time:
In an editorial headlined, “Why the RJR circus is so dangerous,” Business Week reflected the business establishment’s distress. “This spectacle is not just unseemly—it is dangerous,” it held. “It is precisely this sort of behavior that plays into the hands of those who want to shackle the free market with unnecessary regulation. LBOs, including a potential RJR deal, should stand or fall on their financial and economic merits, not on the childish behavior of the principals.” For all the high-level handwringing, few felt the effects of the escalating fight as keenly as RJR Nabisco’s employees. In Atlanta, office workers sat during lunch periods glumly reading the daily news summaries the company issued. Isolated, irritated, and uncertain of their futures, the staff spent its days consumed with following the events on Wall Street, its spare time channeled into producing anti-Johnson propaganda.
A three pronged bidding war for RJR Nabisco was on:
The public the bidding for RJR Nabisco seemed frenzied, the emergence of a third bidding group transforming it into a wide-open race. But in the subdued hallways and offices of Lazard Freres and Dillon Read, there was no such enthusiasm. To the board’s advisers, the First Boston bid was hardly good news. Few among them had any confidence that Maher’s troops would come back in eight days with a concrete proposal.
KKR was the winner at the end:
Five minutes later discussion inside the boardroom ebbed. “Time is running out,” Hugel said. “Call for a motion.” Marty Davis spoke first. “I move we award to KKR.” “Second,” said John Macomber. “All in favor,” Hugel said. Hands filled the air. “All opposed?” So hands. “The vote,” Hugel said, “is unanimous.
Johnson semi-retired a rich man:
Johnson officially resigned that day, pulling the chord on his $53 million golden parachute.* His fanciest Gulfstream jet yet, ordered before the LBO battle, flew him to Jupiter on its maiden voyage. Johnson released a final statement before leaving: “The process we commenced last October has benefited the company’s shareholders and has proven the financial strength of our varied businesses.”
The shareholders’ were also enriched through the process, although not all of them happy about the proceeding:
Yet in the world’s greatest concentration of RJR shareholders— Winston-Salem, North Carolina—they weren’t thanking Johnson even as the money gushed into town. No sooner had Kravis won than signs began popping up: “Good-bye Ross, Hello KKR.” Nearly $2 billion of checks arrived there in the late-February mail. Now, more than ever, Winston-Salem was “the city of reluctant millionaires.” The river of money had washed away the last of RJR’s stock. Local brokers and bankers who managed people’s money got calls from distraught clients. “I won’t sell my stock,” more than one sobbed. “Daddy said don’t ever sell the RJR stock.” They were patiently told they had to. They were told the world had changed. No sooner had the checks arrived than out-of-town “financial consultants” descended on Winston-Salem to advise its residents on how best to spend their new riches. In leaflets tucked under windshields in the Reynolds parking lot, in pesky phone calls, in seminars at the Holiday Inn, stockbrokers offered to help people reinvest their windfall in the market. The frequent, incredulous response: “You want me to buy stock?”
KKR may have won the battle for RJR Nabisco, but it had lost the war in its investment going sour:
To its credit, Kohlberg Kravis wriggled out of its fix. In July 1990, it announced a $6.9 billion refinancing package, enabling it to buy back the junk bonds and substitute less onerous forms of debt. The costly maneuver probably assured that, as a buyout, RJR would neither be a free-fall disaster nor a windfall profit for Kohlberg Kravis. Whatever the case, it assured big paydays for the bankers and lawyers who reconfigured the original deal: another $250 million in fees. For Kravis ultimate success, it was clear, was years away. To make matters worse, Philip Morris, sensing RJR’s vulnerability, moved in for the kill, pummeling the company in a number of key markets. It expanded its sales force, undercut Reynolds on pricing, and attacked its strong discount brand, Doral, with two new off-price brands of its own. Analysts predicted RJR’s cigarette volume could fall 7 percent to 8 percent in 1989, while Philip Morris gained volume. “Philip Morris is eating our lunch,” Cliff Robbins of Kohlberg Kravis acknowledged in October 1989. “Marlboro is an unstoppable machine. We have a lot to do.”
There are many lessons within this story that extend beyond RJR Nabisco, namely:
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In a sense it had. Johnson was a product of his times, as surely as R. J. Reynolds was of his. The Roaring Eighties were a new gilded age, where winning was celebrated at all costs. “The casino society” Felix Rohatyn once dubbed it. The investment bankers were part croupiers, part alchemists. They conjured up wild schemes, pounded out new and more outlandish computer runs to justify them, then twirled their temptations before executives in a “devil dance.” That, at any rate, is what Johnson took to calling it. Depending on one’s viewpoint, the “dance” Johnson initiated at RJR will go down as either the high point or the low point of an era. It wasn’t an accident that RJR Nabisco should provide that moment. In its final decade Reynolds had become less a great company than a great dream machine. Its torrent of tobacco money allowed egos to run wild and fantasies to become true. Paul Sticht could walk with kings. Ed Horrigan could live like kings. Directors could be treated like kings…The founders of both RJR and Nabisco would have utterly failed to understand what was going on here. It is not so hard, in the mind’s eye, to see R. J. Reynolds and Adolphus Green wandering through the carnage of the LBO war. They would turn to one another, occasionally so much about what came out of their computers and so little about what came out of their factories? Why were they so intent on breaking up instead of building up? And last: What did this all have to do with doing business?
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To some, this saga wasn’t just about the fall of RJR Nabisco but the rise of an “I’ve got mine” ethos that would permeate every corner of corporate America. Even partners at once-staid accounting firms came to see themselves more as croupiers than auditors. Paul Volcker, who was chairman of Arthur Andersen in its dying days, believes its accountants became accomplices to Enron because they were so envious of such clients’ riches. As Volcker explained it, “The accountants felt like, ‘We’re as good as they are and we’re doing all the work.’ The general atmosphere was, ‘Money is out there for the taking.'” Reverbrations from the RJR buyout would also long be felt all up and down Wall Street. The deal went so badly for KKR and was attacked so vehemently by politicians that LBO firms pulled in their horns and eschewed mega-deals for years thereafter.
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The ensuing period is eerily reminiscent of the early 1990s-post RJR hangover, which raises a question: does anyone on Wall Street ever really learn anything? Colin Blaydon isn’t so sure. “When there’s a situation like this and everyone comes piling into a market they don’t fully understand, the financial markets always overshoot,” he says. “There are a lot of parallels to the world of the bubble that gave us RJR Nabisco.” Be assured, however, that the Barbarians are out there just beyond the gate, licking their wounds, biding their time, waiting for their next chance to storm the gates.
One of the best business books I have read to date, both in terms of content and delivery. A must read.
The Timesheet Chronicles 