Worldwide trend toward mergers

The Daily Telegraph | Worldwide trend toward mergers:

"GLOBAL merger and acquisition action boomed in 2005 and is tipped to have a flying start next year. Japan has emerged as the quiet achiever while the number of Australian deals pulled back over the past year."

Yes, we are watching fewer and fewer companies and increasingly more standardisation. To have certain areas of communality across the world is not such a bad thing, but to lose long time family favourites, regional specialists and locally produced food, in particular, is a loss to any area. Wiping out culture may be the way of the world and given some global companies are bigger than nations, it is making geographical boundaries irrelevant. Global companies can exert a down ward trend in conditions and pricing when they want to and do not understand allegiance to local areas. Doesn't matter if an area and its people are being changed for the worse as long as the company is okay. The company are the owners and the stockholders so shifting the wealth out of an nation is quite easy under those conditions. Maybe it's how we are going to be. This homogenous world without cultural differences and this may be how it is going to be achieved. In any case, as the article points out, there are massive amounts of money to be had in global deals. Who benefits?