Yet other aspects of the results were distinctly uninspiring In fact it turns out to have been British all along, a high profile brand with a surprisingly low profile corporate presence.The chairman, Sir Richard George, the third generation of his family to be involved with the company, would have liked to keep it that way, but after a long search for ambient brands - that is food stuffs with a long shelf life - to complement his raft of breakfast cereals, he was eventually forced to concede that there was nothing for sale even remotely as attractive as his own core product.Yet in the battle for shelf space and bargaining power with the big supermarket groups, Weetabix has to get bigger if it is not eventually to be a lot smaller. It's only once in a blue moon that assets like these come up for sale.Telegraph GroupThe phones have been ringing off the hook at Lazard ever since it was announced that the City investment bank has been retained by Hollinger International to examine strategic options for the company, including a possible sale of its main asset, the Telegraph Group. If Mr Sarin can get these things right, then he will have built a lasting monument to Sir Christopher Gent's legacy.Weetabix saleLike everyone else, you might have thought that Weetabix was owned by Kellogg's, Nestl?or one of the other big overseas foods groups. For Lyndon Lea, the American financier who runs Hicks, Muse in Europe, the deal is therefore quite a coup. Besides the money, Weetabix will fit neatly into the portfolio of food brands already owned by Hicks, Muse, which includes Typhoo tea and Branston pickle.With Weetabix, Hicks, Muse will be close to achieving its aim of a UK food manufacturing group that might eventually take its place in the FTSE 100. The £642m offer from the US-based private equity house Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst seemed to Sir Richard like too good an offer to refuse. Though the company has rebranded as Vodafone throughout many of the operations it has bought into worldwide, it is still essentially a collection of different local networks, with separate tariff structures, services and subscriber profiles. Crucially, Vodafone has neither management nor economic control over its mobile assets in the US The same is true of France. The launch of third-generation services may temporarily reverse the trend, but nobody believes that 3G will provide anything like the boost once expected.
It's terribly early for such an entrepreneurially driven company, but Vodafone is taking on the attributes of a utility stock. Yet the company still has one big advantage over its rivals: it is the only mobile operator with anything like a global presence.The challenge for Mr Sarin is to make Vodafone's global footprint perform like a genuinely global corporation. Revenue growth was just 13 per cent, average revenue per subscriber was flat, and the group is still miles behind its target of 20 per cent of revenue from non voice sources.Vodafone is hardly alone in reporting such disappointing numbers The whole industry is slowly but surely going ex-growth. Free cash flow in the half-year period was up 61 per cent to £4.6bn, which explains the decision to start paying back shareholders. Yet other aspects of the results were distinctly uninspiring. Does this mean we've already seen the best of Vodafone's growth phase? Hard to believe given what a new industry mobile telephony still is, yet in all probability also true. The interim results show a company performing largely to script, in that it has begun to throw off enormous amounts of cash. "This is just another part of our country's tragedy," said Ahmed, a grizzled former Iraqi army officer who is trying to make a living as a taxi driver. |
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