More big consumer brands are being dealt across the Atlantic. With Kraft’s bid for Cadbury churning, consumer goods giant Unilever plans to pay 1.275 billion euros ($1.87 billion) for a chunk of Sara Lee’s personal care brands, helping the cake maker sheds non-core businesses to focus on food. Sara Lee shareholders are sweet on the deal – bidding the stock up more than 9 percent in early trade. In a space reserved for winners and losers, this deal looks like it has natural benefits for both parties.

The asset sale is quite a bit less rich than the chocolate deal, which is for the whole of Cadbury rather than just its brands, the soap business brings with it a fresh scent of a recovery in deals activity. It is the first major acquisition for the Anglo-Dutch company’s new Chief Executive Paul Polman, and Sara Lee’s CEO Brenda Barnes is still only half-way through her business-shedding exercise.

Credit Suisse analyst Charlie Mills said the price Unilever is paying of 10 times core operating profit, or EBITDA, is not huge by industry standards, reflecting the fairly disparate collection of assets. Brylcream hair gel is part of the mix.

“We’re not convinced that this is the greatest collection of assets but another acquisition shows Unilever still moving from the back foot (cost cutting and disposals) to the front foot (volume growth and acquisitions),” he said. It may also be worth remembering that the deal speaks to Unilever’s business. It is built on brands, whereas Sara Lee is a brand unto itself.

So far as markets are concerned, Sara Lee is the winner here. Having been able to find a buyer for a huge chunk of assets it had on the block, it is now going to be able to buy back more stock and preserve its 11-cent quarterly dividend.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s plan to IPO is nothing new - the company filed its paperwork to do so a year ago. So why should the storied firm of private equity titan Henry Kravis (pictured) choose now to tap this battered market? Problems at its Amsterdam-listed fund are also hardly new. Shares of the fund, set to be exchanged for new NYSE-listed KKR shares as part of the offering, jumped 27 percent during morning trade. They had fallen about 30 percent since the beginning of May, and had lost more than half their value since late February last year as the credit crisis bit. It’s hard to see the deal framed as a statement of confidence that IPO investors are going to step up to the bar, given all the grim news swirling capital markets. What else might be prompting this move? Carlyle Capital Corp, an affiliate of U.S.-based buyout firm Carlyle Group and mainly invested in mortgage-backed assets, went bankrupt in March and liquidated its assets as it could not meet margin calls from its lenders. KPE said in March it had no exposure to residential real estate loans, but its net asset value dropped 3.4 percent in the second quarter amid investment losses and foreign currency transactions after a 5.4 percent drop in net assets from operations in the first quarter.

Consumer goods giant Unilever agreed to sell its North American laundry business to private equity firm Vestar Capital Partners for about $1.45 billion to complete the bulk of its sell-off program. The business makes Snuggle, Wisk and Surf products and had been looking to sell it for almost a year in its struggle to compete as a distant No. 2 behind archrival Procter and Gamble. Vestar intends to fold the business into its Huish Detergents operations and re-name it Sun Products Corp.

Other deals of the day:

* Britain’s BAE Systems said it had made a recommended offer for Detica Group, a provider of IT services to the national security sector, at 440 pence a share, valuing the business at about 538 million pounds ($1.07 billion) including assumed debt.

* French electrical engineering group Schneider Electric has agreed to buy Canada’s Xantrex for 415 million Canadian dollars ($409.3 million) to boost its renewable energy equipment operations.

* U.S. computer services and software group International Business Machines has agreed to buy French software maker Ilog for 215 million euros ($340 million), the companies said.

* Greek buyout firm Marfin Investment Group bought a 50 percent stake in Croatian tourism group Sunce Koncen as part of its expansion plans, MIG said in a statement.

* China’s Sichuan New Hope Agribusiness said it has acquired a dairy producer in Inner Mongolia in a deal that a Chinese newspaper said was worth 100 million yuan ($14.7 million).

* LUKOIL, Russia’s second-largest oil producer, has acquired 100 percent of Turkish firm Akpet, which accounts for about 5 percent of Turkey’s oil retail market, the company said.