Jardine Matheson: From opium to empire
It is a rare distinction for a company to serve as the inspiration for an entire series of James Clavell’s celebrated bodice-rippers, and it’s fair to say that Jardine’s has a bit more swash and buckle in its history than the average corporate.
Founded in the year of the Great Reform Act, five years before the accession of Queen Victoria, it was instrumental in the rise of Hong Kong as a trading hub after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.
It may have made its mark smuggling large quantities of opium from the Raj into mainland China, but it soon diversified into less controversial sectors and grew to be the largest of the Hongs that dominated trade with the East. With the seventh generation of the Keswick family at the helm, Jardine’s has enjoyed a rerating with its share price gaining about 50% this year.
It unwound a defensive cross-holding structure that protected family control at the expense of its share price in 2021, and it has changed its strategy to become an engaged long-term investor rather than an owner-operator of its assets.
It has appointed private equity veteran Lincoln Pan as CEO to drive this transformation, while Ben Keswick remains in overall command as executive chair.
Jardine’s is taking out minorities in the Mandarin Oriental hotel group and taking it private, while selling off the top 13 floors of its shiny One Causeway Bay tower to Alibaba and Ant Group for a handy $925m.
It has lived through a few changes as it approaches its 200th birthday, and will see many more.
Marks & Spencer: Hit by hackers
There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth across the heart of middle England as the nation’s favourite purveyor of the 100% cotton gusset has had to announce that its profits have essentially been wiped out by a crippling cyberattack.
Hackers struck over the Easter weekend, and the company had to shut down its website entirely for six weeks and go back to manual ordering, which led to empty shelves and frustrated customers. It estimates it lost £324m of trading profit in the first half, of which £100m was recoverable from an insurer.
Pre-tax profit fell by a chunky 99% to £3.4m in the six months to September, down from £391.9m the year before. Its clothing, home and beauty division was particularly hard hit, with sales down 16.4%, while the food business was more resilient, with sales up 7.8%.
CEO Stuart Machin was confident that the second half would see a return to form and a continuation of the turnaround that has revived the fortunes of the retailer, and he predicted that profits would be “at least in line with last year”.
Of course the elephant in the room is the budget on November 26, with consumers bracing themselves for whatever fresh hell Rachel from accounts is preparing to unleash. The chancellor appeared to be softening up her future victims in an unusual pre-budget speech, and there seems to be little doubt that the wallets of the nation are in for a hammering. Machin urged her to stop blaming the past, reform business rates and slash regulatory costs — but above all not to raise taxes.
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