Loosely because no analysts have any faith in their forecasts ahead of the appointment of a new finance director
Posted in General on 22. Sep, 2010
(Loosely because no analysts have any faith in their forecasts ahead of the appointment of a new finance director.)Sir Ken knows his performance is under scrutiny. Investors have been making that plain ever since profits warning number one in July. One large shareholder warned recently: “Were things to deteriorate further, Sir Ken’s position would become untenable, even though he has a lot of fans.”Sir Ken has also lost the safeguard of a controlling family shareholding. Should Sir Ken’s be the next?Tim Sawyer, the head of RREV, may believe so. He said Sir Ken’s role “called into question whether the board can adequately oversee and evaluate the performance of senior officers of the company”. And this at a group loosely expected to make one-third less profit in its enlarged guise this year as it was tipped to do before it spent £3bn on Safeway.
(He was holidaying in Italy.) That has helped fuel speculation he could soon depart, with some mooting the former Tory MP and Asda chairman Archie Norman as a prime candidate for chief executive.Friday’s warning was the group’s fourth in 10 months and served only to batter further Morrisons’ image in the eyes of the City. Its shares have slumped 25 per cent since it finally got its hands on Safeway 14 months ago. Such is the scale of the crisis that the stock rose 3.75p yesterday to 191.75p on the belief the company itself is now a takeover target.Analysts at CSFB wrote: “We realise that management credibility has been impacted, possibly to the extent that the team is no longer trusted to deliver.” There has already been one boardroom scalp, in the form of Martin Ackroyd, the group’s long-serving finance director. Like RREV, the NAPF’s investor support body, Pirc is afraid that Mr Stott is a mere corporal when it comes to the battles being waged – against rival supermarkets and in the boardroom. Mr Stott, Pirc fears, lacks “sufficient scope to fulfil the [chief executive's] role in practice”.City observers noted that Mr Stott, hitherto joint managing director, was not even in the country when Morrisons issued its latest profits warning on Friday. Sir Ken Morrison is running out of places to hide.
Yesterday a third shareholder advisory group added its voice to those calling for the head of the man who has run Wm Morrison since being handed the family baton by his father more than four decades ago
Sir Ken Morrison is running out of places to hide. Although the 73-year-old chairman recently paid lip service to the ideals espoused by corporate governance bodies and yielded his chief executive’s role to Bob Stott, few in the City were fooled as to who calls the shots in Bradford.Pirc said yesterday it regarded Sir Ken as the group’s “de facto chairman and chief executive”. Charges have also risen, up to £1.85 for a single cash withdrawal. The group’s results will fully benefit from the converted HBOS machines next year when profits could well exceed £11.3m.Cardpoint achieved respectable like-for-like revenue growth of 9 per cent in the first half. It is thought to have approached Moneybox to defend itself against a possible takeover bid from a large US rival At 117.5p, it’s a buy, but not without risk.. Turnover was up 80 per cent to £10m and it is now just about breaking even. Gaming companies pay Gaming Corp every time a user clicks through to their site from Casino.co.uk, and 40 per cent of its 3 million users end up on Gaming Corp’s own casino businesses.Since March, the company has signed two more lucrative deals.
It is now supplying casino games to Orange mobile phone users and it has also bought another gaming website portal. Gambling is the US’s largest internet gambling search engine and appears as the first result of a Google search for “gambling”.In Casino.co.uk and Gambling , Gaming Corp has two prime domain names in a fast-growing market where there are already hundreds of operators. Except this time it appears to be more profitable.Gaming Corporation, whose website, Casino.co.uk, acts like a Yahoo! or Google for internet gambling sites, said yesterday it had had a “monumental” first six months of the year as it announced interim results to the end of March. There are also some UK consumer titles left within UAP: Dalton’s Weekly and Exchange & Mart.Mr Levin is likely to keep most of these with the possible exception of UAP, reckoned to be worth £65m. Mr Levin, who started a month ago, has already spoken of making acquisitions, though he described these as “bolt-on”.
At 481.5p, UBM shares are pretty fully valued but worth holding to see how Mr Levin does.Place your bets on Gaming CorpThe phenomenal growth in internet gambling is akin to the dot boom all over again. Morgan Stanley, the broker, puts a value of £270m on these non-core interests, including £200m for the stake in Five. It was supposedly core but was put up for sale this year and fetched a great price – £383m (of which £300m will be returned to shareholders). UBM felt that NOP was not a big enough to be a global player.What remains at UBM is its PR Newswire division, which distributes press releases, and its trade exhibitions and business-to-business publications interests: CMP US (hi-tech and healthcare), CMP Asia (most exhibitions), CMPi (UK), CMP Medica (European healthcare). As UBM pointed out, £100 invested in 1978, when Lord Hollick (then plain Clive Hollick) took the helm, would be worth £15,000 today, outperforming the FTSE over that period by 50 per cent. But the change of management (David Levin, an outside appointee, is now in charge, while the chief operating officer Malcolm Wall has also gone) and the recent sale of one of the group’s major businesses, NOP, makes for a good time to reassess the attractions of UBM.
The company sold out of its major consumer media interests – its ITV franchises and The Express newspaper group – five years ago.