As the world's consumer-goods companies restructure, you might have thought that one in particular would be able to put up its feet. Sara Lee, a $20 billion-a-year combine of cakes, coffee, meat and underwear, has long been a model for the industry. Three years ago, the group embraced the concept of "weightlessness", announcing a $3 billion restructuring plan under which it planned to sell many of its factories and to turn itself from a capital-intensive manufacturer into an asset-free brand manager. This move to "de-verticalise", as John Bryan, the group's veteran chairman and chief executive, termed it, was hailed at the time as a shift into the "knowledge age".
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