Pepsi Buys Control of Russian Juicemaker for $1.4 billion

That price tag for juice maker JSC Lebedyansky makes it PepsiCo Inc.'s biggest foreign acquisition ever.

Deal fits two criteria important to the
company: building its portfolio of healthier products and getting
market share in the quickly growing markets of Brazil, India, Russia
and China.

PepsiCo, the second-biggest U.S. soft
drink company and maker of Frito-Lay snacks, and bottler Pepsi
Bottling Group Inc. will buy a 75.5 percent stake in Lebedyansky from
the company's four biggest individual stockholders. Once the deal
closes, the two companies will offer to buy the remaining shares, as
required by Russian law. They could end up owning all the shares.

Last year, a report by Moscow's Troika
Dialog investment bank said Russia's market for fruit juice and beer
is expected to become Europe's biggest by volume in 2008. White said
Lebedyansky is the biggest juice maker in Europe and the
sixth-largest in the world. It holds 30 percent of the market share
in Russia, where the volume of juice consumed grew an average of 15
percent a year from 2001 to 2006.