Cemex’s takeover of Rinker is well on the way to completion, reports the Associated Press. The takeover offer has won just over 50 percent of shareholders, who will now reap some of the $14.3 billion the Mexican concrete giant offered for the company.

Rinker management questioned the deal as "opportunistic" because the shares had been knocked down because of the U.S. housing slump. Sydney-based Rinker gets 80 percent of its revenues from major housing markets like Florida, Arizona and Nevada although management argued that those states also had big infrastructure projects in the pipeline that would hold up revenue projections. (Rinker may not have reckoned on the extremely slimmed down transportation budget that came out of the Legislature for Southern Nevada.)

The other interesting point noted by the AP report is that transnational takeovers are no longer restricted to developed countries. In fact, the Cemex takeover of an Australian company that does the great majority of its business in the U.S. shows that developing countries now have the capital and expertise to buy out major companies in industrial economies. Many of these big companies began life as state monopolies and are now privatized, so they will have to adapt business strategies to the new markets they’re buying into. So, wouldn’t Cemex seem to be the fulfillment of NAFTA?