Chinese Firm Offers To Buy Smithfield

Reuters:

China's Shuanghui International plans to buy Smithfield Foods Inc (SFD.N) for $4.7 billion to feed a growing Chinese appetite for U.S. pork, but the proposed takeover of the world's No. 1 producer has stirred concern in the United States.
The transaction, announced on Wednesday, would rank as the largest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company, with an enterprise value of $7.1 billion, including debt assumption.
As it stands. the deal is the biggest Chinese play for a U.S. company since CNOOC Ltd offered to buy Unocal for about $18 billion in 2005. The state-controlled energy company later withdrew that bid under U.S. political pressure.
Like similar foreign transactions, the Smithfield deal will face the scrutiny of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, a government panel that assesses national security risks.
And at least one member of Congress said the deal raised alarms about food safety, noting Shuanghui was forced to recall tainted pork in the past.
"I have deep doubts about whether this merger best serves American consumers and urge federal regulators to put their concerns first," U.S. Representative Rose DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, said in a statement.

Seriously, as if U.S. producers don't have meat recalls? It will be interesting to see what happens with this.  Nobody pitched much of a fit when JBS came from Brazil and bought something like 30% of our beef processing capacity (it would have been more but the Justice Department called anti-trust on them), is China scarier?  The good thing is that my 101 shares of Smithfield (I owned shares in Premium Standard Farms before Smithfield bought them) went up like 28% in value.  Maybe this is the Chinese version of buying Pebble Beach Golf Course or Rockefeller Center was when the Japanese were at the apex of their economic might.  I remember how xenophobic I was back then.  I'm just not feeling too concerned right now.