The great maw of China

BABY food looks like glop, but it is an attractive business. Global sales are $30 billion and growing by 10% annually, mostly thanks to developing countries. That is why Nestlé, a Swiss food giant, is paying so much for the infant-nutrition arm of Pfizer, an American drug firm. On April 23rd it announced that it would buy Pfizer Nutrition for $11.85 billion—almost 50% more than analysts thought it was worth only a few months ago.Nestlé, the world’s biggest foodmaker, was not the only bidder. It had to beat Danone, its big French rival, which was also keen to gobble up Pfizer’s baby-food brands such as S-26 Gold, Promil and SMA. The price tag was a hefty 20 times Pfizer Nutrition’s estimated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation this year.Kurt Schmidt, the boss of Nestlé Nutrition, says it will be worth it. Mr Schmidt is a baby-food veteran, having joined Nestlé in 2007 when it took over Gerber, an American maker of baby food, of which he was the boss. His new Swiss colleagues may or may not have told him that gerber...