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2011-04-19 05:02:28
18 April 2011 Last updated at 20:25 GMT
Pietro Ferrero Pietro Ferrero ran the firm with his brother, Giovanni
Italian chocolate tycoon Pietro Ferrero has died in an accident in South
Africa, a company spokesman has said.
Mr Ferrero, 48, was on a business trip and died after falling off his bicycle,
probably because of an ailment, the company said.
He was joint chief executive - along with his brother - of the Ferrero group,
which owns Nutella and Kinder.
His father Michele, Italy's richest man, turned the company into a global giant
of the confectionery industry.
Nutella
Mr Ferrero's grandfather, also Pietro, started the company in 1942 in the
northern Italian town of Alba, where the firm is still based.
Because of wartime shortages, chocolate was difficult to obtain. The elder
Pietro Ferrero hit upon a recipe which combined cocoa with locally abundant
hazelnuts.
That concoction - Nutella spread - became an international success.
In 2009, the company expressed interest in a bid for the UK confectionery
group, Cadbury. However, it abandoned the plan and Cadbury was instead taken
over by US-based Kraft Foods.
"Italy has lost a businessman who represented the best qualities of our
economic history," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in a
statement.
Mr Ferrero was also chairman of Ferrero SpA, the Italian branch of the firm.
The Ferrero company had an annual turnover of 6.6 billion euros ($9.4 billion)
in its 2009-2010 financial year, the AFP news agency reports.
The business is still family-owned.