Well there's Bayer and Monsanto. Unilever has been on a buying spree. The DOJ is apparently trying to stop a bunch of health insurance companies from merging lately. Fits bought Chrysler a few years back. That's what I can't think of off the top of my head.
There have been shit tons. Fiat bought Chrysler as a troubled asset. That was after Daimler bought it then sold it back because it lost them a shit ton of money. My favorite was when Harley Davidson bought MV Agusta (because why the fuck not?) for 109 million euros in 2008, spent 20 million euros on it, then sold it back to the Italians for 3 euros. Not 3 million. Three. After Proton did the same thing did the same thing in 2004 and 2005, except the numbers were 70 million euros and 1 euro respectively.
Damn. Two of those mergers were electrical utilities and a third was gas energy. I thought mergers in those areas tended to be discouraged by governments to prevent monopolies. Interesting. Also, how the heck does buying an asset for millions of dollars and then turning around and selling it for pennies make sense? Is that some kind of Wall Street money laundering scheme or something?
Well, if you're losing $70m a year, and you've owned it for 2 years, and lost $140m, the time to sell it is right fucking now and if $1 gets it off your balance sheet, you're $70m ahead of where you'd be if you waited another year. Hyperexotic Italian marques are generally not sound financial investments to begin with and attempting to turn them into such is often quite expensive. Daimler made a small fortune out of a large one by buying Chrysler. Fiat appears to be on a similar trajectory.