Unwieldy mega corp

Sir, Whether or not Kraft achieves the market growth and cost savings upon which its bid for Cadbury is predicated is, perhaps, at best risky (report, Jan 19). Increasing size can bring economies of scale but it also makes the task of management more unwieldy. At some point a company becomes weighed down by its own bureaucracy.

In giant companies senior management become divorced from the coalface: customers and employees. Financial models are crunched, in which efficiencies and synergies are numbers, not people. Earnings per share is king. The effect is to dehumanise management.

The winners are senior management, who enjoy the status and trappings that comes with size, the bankers who extract grotesque fees, and the fund managers who take the profit embodied in the share price and exit before the downsides materialise.