Thursday 9 September 2010

Bye Bye UK engingeering

This will be a half-empty and half-full kind of post. The fall in the Pound and the FTSE this past two years has had a disproportionate affect on different sectors in the UK. Some like Banks are well down and indeed, out. Others like Pharma have done well. One other sector that has been beaten down is engineering, companies like Tomkins. Why? Well manufacturing data and worries about world trade abound.

However, this is not how foreigners see it. They see fantastic companies like Tomkins and  Chloride and want to buy in. In fact merger and acquisitions in this sector are all the rage. Hopefully this will lead to a re-rating of shares and so less foreign take-over activity.

Now, this is not to say we Capitalists are against foreign take-overs per se. It's a market, they want to give shareholders money and they can then invest that elsewhere or start again with new businesses. Also the foreigners sometimes find it ain't as easy as it looks and you can overpay, check out DP World with their P&O ports acquisition.

But there is a market here for cheap take-outs of some of our best companies, which of course presents itself as a good opportunity for some stake building of your own in anticipation of this. After Chloride though, I am more at a loss as this is not my sector, any insight from the readership?

9 comments:

Laban said...

The trouble is, buy a company and you buy their customers (assuming you can stay competitive).

When times become hard, and you're a US or German company with a Brit subsidiary, which plant gets the chop? The home-based one or the British one?

JMillar said...

Tomkins is a bit of an oddity. Since Gregg Hutchings left, about 10 years ago, it has become a UK based holding company for US operations. (See the senior management and the fact that the shares are denominated in US$.)So being sold to a North American entity is quite rational from a business perspective.

Steven_L said...

I've been watching Balfour Beatty and Keller for a while now.

When I read their reports, they look worth owning.

But I got my fingers singed a little bit on a BB spread bet back in April.

Demetrius said...

Every foreign takeover especially at modern financing levels means extraction of money from the UK economy and tax base. Talking about "investment" means they get the cream and if the rest goes sour they chuck it out. We really ought to know, we built an Empire on this basis.

Andrew - yournetbiz said...

at what point in the system when all the big boys buy out the little guys and there is no room for growth for the big companies.

Dean - Parker Pen said...

Is the building game ever going to get back on track,
cheap labour coming over here to work,

CityUnslicker said...

Laban, maybe but that does depend on exchange etc, I think the UK is a little safer now.

JM Millar - I bow to your superior knowledge on Tomkins.

SL - Speadbetting I sat away from!

Demetrius- Don't agree that it means money always extracted, but if we do lose everything then it could cause a problem if it happnes faster than the economy can transform.

Dean - Not for a while, the property bubble was huge.

James Higham said...

However, this is not how foreigners see it. They see fantastic companies like Tomkins and Chloride and want to buy in. In fact merger and acquisitions in this sector are all the rage. Hopefully this will lead to a re-rating of shares and so less foreign take-over activity.

Coming in as senior partners or to a company which is not going to overwhelm them?

Budgie said...

As Demetrius says: "We really ought to know, we built an Empire on this basis."

Worse, for some sectors, particularly engineering and technology, the cost and effort to re-start is enormous. This can easily be demonstrated by the industrialisation of nations: it takes decades. Once we cede control of our wealth generation and employment, it is very difficult to get it back. Does that matter? Yes.

Take for granted that centralisation and statism are failures; that free trade is fundamental to civil liberties. Yet for all sorts of psychological, cultural, and religious reasons trade between nations cannot be, in the proper sense, 'free trade'. It needs a 'demos' and a unified legal system for free trade.

This is why free trade within the USA is possible, but not (at least for decades) within the EU. Despite the EU 'single market' think: French government ownership of industries; German nationalism (German cars on German roads - 80%+?) etc.

The conclusion is that we should not let our vital national assets go so easily. And that applies to economic power squandered to foreign control as well as political power ceded to the EU. If you give Britain away piecemeal do not be surprised that there will come a time when you realise there is no more Britain left. Only the British are such fools as to think foreigners will look after us.