96% of the region’s GDP, providing local and international clients with access to a household research panel across the packaged groceries, toiletries and cosmetics, fresh foods and textile retail markets. In early March 2008, TNS announced the merging of its North American operating units TNS Media Intelligence, TNS Media Research with the recently acquired firms Compete and Cymfony to create TNS Media Group. On 29 April 2008 TNS announced that it was in talks to merge with German market research company GfK. The announcement was followed in May by two conditional offers from WPP to buy TNS for a combination of cash and shares, both of which were rejected by TNS’s board. The hostile WPP bid led to GfK and TNS abandoning their merger plans. GfK sought without success to find backing for a rival offer, leaving WPP’s hostile bid as the only one on the table. On 9 October 2008 WPP declared that its latest bid had been successful and that it was buying TNS for $1.93bn. TNS was bought by WPP's Kantar Group. Many Kantar subsidiary companies underwent restructuring and rebranding. In 2013, TNS acquired Sinotrust Market Research, a leading market research and consulting company in China. On 8 September 2016, TNS was rebranded as Kantar TNS. On 2 April 2019, Kantar announced that it was retiring the names of its brands (including Kantar TNS) and consolidating all services and offerings under the Kantar brand name. Operations TNS NIPO is a Dutch survey agency. Together with Synovate (formerly Interview-NSS) and Surveys from Maurice de Hond (Peil.nl), it is one of the top three (political) survey agencies in the Netherlands. In June 2013, TNS NIPO received the MOAward for Market Research Office of the Year. TNS is structured around specific areas of marketing expertise: Brand & Communication; Innovation & Product Development; Retail & Shopper; Customer Experience; Employee Engagement; Qualitative; Automotive; and Political & Social. TNS separates its worldwide operations in over eighty three countries into a number of regional divisions: North America; Northern Europe; Southern Europe; Asia Pacific; Latin America; and Africa, Mediterranean and Middle East. Methods TNS NIPO has a database of thousands of screened respondents. For each survey a selection is made from the database and submitted to the respondents. TNS NIPO's goal is to have the respondents surveyed once every six weeks. TNS NIPO uses software from NIPO Software for its research surveys. The five following