Business Exposed60
to be a listed company’s CEO and, when he nally made it to
the top job, he famously shouted jubilantly in the company’s
corridors, “I’ve won . . . I’ve won!”
Ahold actually already had quite a signicant presence in the US
from the 1970s and 1980s, when they had acquired companies
like BI-Lo, Giant Food stores, First National, and Tops super-
markets, after having examined at least a dozen other take-over
candidates, conducting lengthy due diligence and a number of
visits by all members of Ahold’s management, including some
posing as secret shoppers.
In 1993, when Cees van der Hoeven took the top job, he wanted
to double Ahold’s revenues and prot in ve years, while growing
earnings per share of at least 10 percent per year. In the same year,
Ahold received the Investor Relations Award in the Netherlands,
while Ahold entered Eastern Europe, Portugal, and Singapore.
After several years of solid double-digit growth, winning the
Dutch Invester Relations Award back-to-back, Van der Hoeven
independently announced that the prot growth expectations
for the next ve years were to be increased to 15 percent. In
1996, in just a few months, Ahold consecutively entered ve new
markets: Thailand, Malaysia, Spain, China, and Brazil.
However, the acquisition targets appear to not have been
examined with the same scrutiny as in the past, and murmurs
started that they were also poorly integrated. In 1997, one of
the longest-serving top management-team members took early
retirement, and during his farewell speech spoke directly to Van
der Hoeven: “Cees, you shouldn’t try to become the biggest, but
the best; then you’ll automatically become the biggest.” However,
in 1997 Ahold commited to a prot increase of between 30 and
45 percent and again won the Dutch Investor Relations award. In
1998, Van der Hoeven announced that in the coming ve years,
Ahold will again double in size.
During the management team’s traditional Monday afternoon
lunch – a weekly event dubbed the “acquisition lunch” – the
team approved a signicant number of take-overs on four
different continents. One of them, the American company