DealZone

Kraft said it would split itself into two listed companies, a global snacks business and a North American grocery business, and raised its full-year outlook on better-than-expected quarterly results.

Hitachi and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have begun talks on what would be Japan’s biggest domestic merger, three sources said, heralding a long awaited shake-up of the nation’s industrial behemoths.  Japan Real Time reports on the clumsy merger kabuki which followed a leak to local media.

When Goldman Sachs executed a $479 million block share sale in ICBC this week to help American Express  hedge its position in the Chinese lender, it underscored the sensitivities and challenges of dealmaking in China.

Carl Icahn’s $10.7 billion bid for Clorox has rekindled the debate about his investment style, responsibility and impact on other stakeholders — does he keep corporate America honest or is he in it for a quick profit?

Groupon and LivingSocial are leading a virtual land grab in the world of online coupons. The NYT’s DealBook looks into the industry’s business model. A Bloomberg column weighs in on a Groupon metric called “adjusted consolidated segment operating income.”

As centers of innovation go, there are worse places to place a bet on the past repeating itself than California’s technology hub. Looking beyond the Internet, housing and credit bubbles, it’s still the preferred playground of such leading financial weathervanes as venture capitalists, gizmo nerds and software studs.

Perhaps Wall Street, searching for reasons to remain optimistic about the market’s summer rally, should take heart from the spate of articles painting pictures of green shoots all over Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal’s Deal Journal notes that tech IPOs are staging a comeback, and asks if its time to party like it’s 1999?

Our reporting shows that investors, encouraged by a growing number of acquisitions and public stock flotations in the past few months, are keeping a close eye on a coterie of promising startups in Silicon Valley. David Lawsky identified six privately held companies as the ripest for acquisition or readiness to go public, out of 34 cited in industries ranging from alternative energy to social networking.

With highly touted plans for a new electric car in jeopardy, an overseas investor steps in to provide new capital and a much-needed endorsement.

GM? No, Tesla.

Remarkably, the terms of German automaker Daimler AG’s 10-percent stake in Tesla may have also helped the Silicon Valley electric-car start-up inch closer to GM in value.

Daimler’s vague disclosure of its purchase price as  “double digit million dollar” means Tesla is valued at a minimum of $100 million.
That would make Tesla, which was founded nearly six years ago, about one-eighth the size of 100-year-old GM.