Pound's plunge opens UK's tech SMBs to foreign buyouts - analyst The £24bn purchase of Brit tech success ARM Holdings by Japan giant Softbank this summer was a contentious affair. The new government claimed it demonstrated that post-EU referendum Britain is “open for business”, although it has also voiced concern about British assets falling to overseas buyers with talk of a more focused " …
It’s ridiculous that we don’t protect our companies from buyouts by foreign businesses. You could argue that permitting buyouts is business-friendly - but it isn’t nation-friendly and it we persist in allowing our assets to be sold in this manner there’ll be no wealth left in the country. Rover (to BMW), Cadburys (to Kraft), Rowntrees and Lyons (to Nestle), Tetley, British Steel, Jaguar and LandRover (to Tata), Apricot (to Fujitsu), Acorn (to Olivetti), ARM (to SoftBank Group), Reuters (to Thomson), Walkers (to PepsiCo), Weetabix (to Bright Food), Thames Water (Macquarie), O2 (Telefònica), EE (Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom), Heathrow (Grupo Ferrovial), The Times (News International), ASDA (Walmart), Boots (Walgreens)… I could go on.
The truth is that successive governments have bled this country dry and lack the patriotic balls to protect this countries interests. We sign up for Brexit, and we lose the last few protections that we have - I mean, at least some of the buyers of our assets are European.
I’d say that we’re at risk of only owning tuppenny-ha’penny businesses that no one else wants, but it seems that that has already happened. Of course the pound has no value. This country has no value anymore.
Our listed companies are owned by shareholders around the world. Mostly the big institutions, such as our insurance companies and pension funds.
The foreign-listed companies who buy them are likewise owned by shareholders around the world. Want a stake in ARM? You can still buy softbank shares: just ask your broker. Or more likely today, just log in to your platform.
I note your list omits Autonomy, the company bought by a hubristic Hewlett Packard (to lots of scepticism from Reg commentards), and more recently re-acquired by Micro Focus, a British company that also owns quite a few former US software companies. Though your list does feature quite a few companies that were bust when taken over (some of them repeatedly bust: most notably the car makers that have been bailed out countless times by taxpayers, going right back to British Leyland in the 1960s).
Oh, and I don't think you're even factually quite right. Was there ever a business called EE that was under different/british-labelled ownership?
My list certainly isn't exhaustive, and neither does it exclude companies which have been sold by their new owners and repurchased. Indeed, you may also be right about EE. My point is that other countries do block the sale of their own businesses to foreign businesses. And good on them for doing so because it's a relatively cheap way of protecting jobs and keeping wealth in the country.
The British way of not interfering is idiotic. I certainly don't advocate the public ownership of businesses - as you rightly point out in the case of British Leyland that was an almighty cock up. But BL, or rather its successor Rover, was in a very healthy, profit making condition when we stupidly sold it to BMW in the 1990s. They kindly let us have it back very cheaply after they'd stripped it and crashed it into a wall.
Anyway it won't last. Once the overseas investors understand that any operation in the UK that they buy will be unable to trade profitably outside the EU, due to tariffs and other barriers, they will only go for targets that have portable assets such as intellectual property and skilled staff eager to emigrate. I guess ARM fits that pattern. Anything that relies on the UK as a trading nation won't be worth buying at any price. (Unless Parliament soon gathers its courage, stops Brexit, and throws the so-called government out.)
If a few % is a "PLUNGE", what is a 50% drop. I recall in 1974 the FTSE 100 dropped from 550 to 147... Similar fall tothe Wall Street Crash. That's a plunge. This was an adjustment, expected by the IMF as the£ appeared overvalued, waiting to happen and needing a catalyst.Brexit just allowed the stress in the fiscal fault line to be released.
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