The Japanese will own 51 percent of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center this winter, 51 percent of Radio City Music Hall and 51 percent of the Art Deco skyscraper where Tom Brokaw and David Letterman work.
The $846 million investment in Rockefeller Group Inc. this past week by Mitsubishi Estate Co. provoked a fresh spate of headlines about how foreigners, Japanese in particular, were buying up America.The headlines were understandable. The deal involved the first family of American capitalism as well as a major tourist and media center. It came a month after Sony Corp.'s agreement to buy another cultural symbol, Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc.
What was often missed, though, is that while the Japanese are buying in the United States, Americans are buying overseas as well. A case in point is Ford Motor Co.'s agreement this past week to buy the British luxury automaker Jaguar PLC for $2.5 billion.
The Japanese have more capacity to invest abroad because of their towering trade surpluses, but the Americans are making certain not to lose out in the global acquisition game.
Most U.S. overseas purchases scarcely make news. Few noticed this past week when Totes Inc. of Ohio bought a West German umbrella distributor and renamed it Totes Deutschland. Or when International Business Machines Corp. bought one-fifth of a Dutch software company, Delaware Computing, from its Belgian parent.
But despite the lack of publicity back home, Americans were the biggest cross-border buyer of companies in Europe in the first half of 1989, according to British-American Deal Review.