Ask John: Let local bank managers use their initiative to spot a good opportunity

Q If you had a magic wand, what would you do to improve the service that high street banks provide to their business customers?

A My simple answer is to give more authority, trust and freedom to local bank managers. Today, too many decisions are referred to head office where faceless bean counters use inflexible ratios to decide the facilities they offer to customers they’ve never met face to face.

The safety of most loans depends on people, not spread sheets. It is more important for a banker to meet the management team than to analyse a computer generated business plan. Sadly, most of the big banks now see their bank managers as salesmen who are measured against “KPIs” and appraised on their ability to stick to a process. When it comes to approving loans, they have to keep to company rules.

Someone has decided the way to cut out mistakes is to make all decisions at head office. They are wrong. Big mistakes will still be made but by preventing the local man using his initiative good opportunities will be missed. Many highly competent customers will be starved of cash and clobbered by large arrangement fees because their balance sheet fails to fit theoretical financial guidelines.

I will never forget how my local bank manager made a decision that transformed our business. In 1995, one of our main competitors went into receivership. We had been trying to buy the business for several years and at last had the opportunity. There was a lot of interest so we needed to offer a fair price – we decided that meant £3.5m, but NatWest head office would only provide the cash to support a bid of £2.5m. I mortgaged our house for £1m to make up the difference. Alex, my wife, was not happy!

Our offer was only good enough to get us onto a shortlist and it quickly became clear that one of the contenders was our biggest competitor: Mr Minit, a well-funded global business run from Switzerland.

Knowing I was outgunned, I rang the Minit UK managing director and suggested “a half” – my idea was that following a joint bid we would toss a coin to decide who picked the first shop, then take it in turns to choose until every branch had been allocated. After 15 minutes thought he rang back to turn down my offer.

At 6pm that day we submitted sealed bids to decide the winner. We offered £4,019,024 (Richard Branson always suggests you add a little bit extra in case the opposition bids a round number). We won, but the vendor soon discovered we hadn’t got the money.

We were given until 10.00am the following morning to find the cash, while Mr Minit as under bidder waited in the wings to sign the deal.

While we spent hours phoning everyone we knew who might plug the £500k gap, our bank manager, Brian Ferguson, back in Manchester, was working through the night on our behalf. We knew Brian well and he knew what a difference the deal would make. Brian rang at 9.30am to tell us he had authority to lend us the cash we needed.

Thanks to Brian, we did a deal that within two years had increased our annual profit from £400,000 to £2.5m. A result that showed the value of a real bank manager and helped me repay the mortgage within 12 months – which in turn made a major contribution to the happiness of my marriage.

Q I saw a new Timpson shop within a large out of town superstore this week. Does this mean your company is abandoning the high street?

A Over the last two years we have opened lots of supermarket concessions but that definitely doesn’t mean goodbye to Timpson on the high street.

Shopkeeping has always been on the move. When I started work in 1960, a lot of our shops were in the suburbs of big cities like Byker (Newcastle), Waterloo (Liverpool), Aston (Birmingham) and Gorton (Manchester). Since then, retailers have shifted into shopping precincts, town centre malls, retail parks and big regional developments like Bluewater in Kent, but the biggest change has been the move of food shopping into the out of town supermarkets. Now a big slice of trade is moving online. It makes you wonder where people will be shopping 50 years from now.

We haven’t found a way to provide a comprehensive shoe repair and key cutting service on the internet – we still need shops, but they must cater for today’s customers. That is why we are opening in (and in the car parks of) supermarkets. Surprisingly, these new outlets make little difference to the sales at Timpson shops nearby. It seems that lots of supermarket shoppers never do any other shopping.

The supermarkets find that Timpson services help to attract extra customers and we have discovered a new way to grow our business – but our best shops are still located in the centre of town.

People are too quick to forecast a dismal future for traditional shops. Last week Timpson bought Snappy Snaps, the London-based franchised photo business with 121 shops. That shows that I still have plenty of faith in the future of the high street.

View the original article here

Continue

BHP: No drama as Scotsman Andrew Mackenzie takes top job in mining

While professional headhunters were hired to look for external candidates to rival those inside the company, the field narrowed to four: Mr Mackenzie and his colleagues Mike Yeager, BHP’s Texan petroleum chief; its ferrous and coal head Marcus Randolph; and corporate development head Alberto Calderon.

Mr Mackenzie, however, was judged by the board to have the edge due to the breadth of his experience, with years at oil giant BP before stints at Rio Tinto and BHP leaving him with an in-depth knowledge of the energy sector, as well as the staples of iron ore, copper and the rest.

That was of crucial importance for a diversified group like BHP, which has aggressively entered the shale oil and gas arena in the US.

As Jac Nasser, BHP’s chairman, put it, the new CEO is “one of the few executives out there who has an experience profile that matches our business.”

He had also “attended every board meeting since he joined us and he ran one of our biggest groups, the non-ferrous groups, so over 50pc of the workforce was under his leadership.”

In terms of the act Mr Mackenzie has to follow, Mr Kloppers does not boast an unblemished record. Chief among the disappointments was BHP’s failed $39bn (£26bn) bid for fertiliser giant Potash Corp which was blocked by Canadian regulators – demonstrating the difficulties in pulling off such megadeals.

Nonetheless, out of this wave of exiting mining CEOs, Kloppers is seen as “the one who, how do I put it nicely, destroyed the least amount of value,” in the words of one fund manager.

The 2.35pc fall in BHP’s shares on Wednesday following the news, down to £21.83½ in London, underlined the market regard for Mr Kloppers, rather than pointing to significant qualms about his replacement.

Mr Mackenzie’s oil experience inevitably means there will now be speculation BHP will move further into that area.

But the company argued the new boy did not represent a change in strategy, having already been shifting its focus – like the rest of the sector – to efficiency and extracting value from existing mines, rather than fresh growth projects and M&A, given weaker commodity prices.

“There are many things that will not change under my leadership,” said Mr Mackenzie.

Investors will be hoping that means the lack of drama will continue.

Scottish scientist turned industry captain now leads BHP

A scientist turned captain of industry, Andrew Mackenzie, 56, once named his science and language skills – he speaks five – as his “secret weapons”.

So far, they have helped him along a stellar trajectory. As a schoolboy growing up in the Scottish town of Kirkintilloch, he won science prizes donated by the local Miners’ Welfare group before graduating as top student in geology at St Andrew’s.

An academic career attracted the attention of the oil giants, before he joined BP’s research arm in 1983. There, he ended up running its chemical businesses in the US.

He moved to mining giant Rio Tinto in 2004 to head its industrial minerals division, where he oversaw the building of a $5bn titanium mine in Madagascar .

In 2007, BHP’s Marius Kloppers hired him to run the group’s non-ferrous arm, positioning him as a prime contender to take the top job.

Mr Mackenzie and Liz, his wife of 35 years whom he met at university, have two daughters.

View the original article here

Continue

Cash returns are on the horizon as mining investors call the shots

However, most of these charges have already been anticipated by the market and investors are expecting that cash piles will grow as spending slows.

Liam Fitzpatrick, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said: “The sector is past peak capex [capital expenditure] and margins are improving on higher prices and reduced cost pressures.” But he said company cashflows will not see a major uplift until 2014 and beyond because significant investment is still needed this year.

Things are looking fairly bright in a sector that spent 2012 coping with soaring costs and falling commodity prices. But prices have recovered from lows and miners are producing more of their product than they ever have before.

Paul Bloxham, an economist at HSBC, said: “The death of the mining boom has been greatly exaggerated, as the pick-up in exports illustrates.”

Shipments of iron ore to China from Australia’s Port Hedland climbed by a quarter in December on a month-on-month basis, rising 21pc over 2012. Production of iron ore from the Pilbara region of Western Australia is expected to rise 17pc this year. Coal exports are expected to jump 10pc.

Andrew Keen, a mining analyst at HSBC in London, sees a new, prudent approach to spending from mining executives, leading to an improvement in their companies’ financial positions.

“We are entering a period of more conservative capital allocation to which all will conform,” Mr Keen said. “This means cuts in capital spending, deferral of the approval of major projects and financial consolidation. Balance sheets are likely to look healthy at the end of 2013.”

However, he said this trend was not going to be driven by the new management teams. “We think capital discipline is improving, but more because this is the prevailing demand of investors, rather than because this crop of CEOs is changing,” he said. “In our view, rather than personalities, strategy is driven more by market circumstances, and the whims of investors, than either CEOs or investors are probably comfortable to admit.”

So investor pressure is likely to lead to what investors want – a cash return. Special dividends over the next few years seem likely, as do buybacks.

However, “maverick” chief executives could still carry on spending. There is talk that once Glencore completes its merger with Xstrata it is considering making a bid for Anglo American.

Then there’s Mr Davis, who has M&A in his blood. Speculation is that he could join a private equity house and go on a spending spree that isn’t scrutinised by the public markets. Then he really would be in the driving seat – and could ignore the short-term whims of the City. The spending may not be over yet. GW

Copper prices received a fillip at the end of last week after car sales hit a record in China. January passenger vehicle sales in the Asian nation jumped 45pc year-on-year to 1.7m units. The figure is 9.2pc higher than in December. Copper is an economically sensitive metal because of its use in wiring and pipe. A conventional car contains between 20kg and 25kg of copper, according to research by the European Copper Institute.

Hybrid cars have not yet taken off in China, but US manufacturer Tesla Motors recently revealed plans to open a shop in Beijing. Should they take off, copper demand will soar, as hybrid vehicles contain about 33kg of the metal. GW

A tasty Texan steak just got a little rarer, after the size of the US cattle herd hit a 61-year low.

Farmers have been slaughtering their herds as feed costs soar due to drought in grain growing regions in the US Midwest and Russia.

This is the sixth-consecutive year that the cattle herd has shrunk, hitting 89.3m head, an annual fall of 1.6pc. The number of animals being reared for beef has slumped by 11pc since 2007. This is despite US cattle prices being at historically high levels at about $125 per animal. US beef output may drop 2.4pc in 2013, as the pace of slaughter slows down, according to industry researcher CattleFax.

Scott George, incoming president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told Reuters: “It’s rather bleak but we’ve never seen such high prices for the cattle, so, there are opportunities out there if a guy has grass and moisture and can run cattle.”

He remains “cautiously optimistic” that the country’s beef sector will recover.

Beef production this year could suffer its second largest year-on-year decline in the past 35 years, according to Derrell Peel, a livestock specialist at Oklahoma State University. He believes US domestic beef production could fall 4.8pc this year.

Such a fall has only been outdone once, in 2004, when the US herd shrunk by 6.4pc following the discovery of BSE. GW

View the original article here

Continue

Commodities: Diamond prices stabilise and market moves into a stronger position

Nomura now reckons that the prospect of flat diamond pricing has set a floor for the valuation of listed diamond companies.

“After this correction, we believe that there is limited downside in the equities. Diamond exposure for the long term, either through Anglo American, or our favoured pure plays Petra Diamonds or Harry Winston is, in our view, worth investigating.”

An absence of significant discoveries means that a supply shortage appears to be on the cards.

“The diamond industry has changed dramatically from the nineties when there was suddenly a rush of new Canadian diamond discoveries and the market had to deal with a substantial De Beers stockpile,” Citigroup analyst Jon H Bergtheil explains. “That stockpile has been whittled down and there has been a real shortage of new diamond discoveries, such that De Beers and key industry consultancy groups believe that the market is heading for a significant shortage in the second half of this decade.”

Earlier this month, Canadian Group Harry Winston sold its luxury retail arm to Swiss group Swatch in order for it to focus purely on diamond mining. The company had previously been a difficult beast for equity markets to value, as it was a mixture of a miner and a high-end retailer (Marilyn Monroe famously sang “talk to me, Harry Winston” in Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend). It has chosen to focus on diamond mining because it is more profitable. In fact, last year the business was more than twice as profitable.

“The margins you can generate at the mining level are better than they’ve been achieving at the retail level,” Edward Sterck, an analyst at BMO Capital markets said.

Investors in the diamond have had a torrid time from price collapse, to a euphoric recovery and back to price collapse. However, now could be a good time to invest in the sector as a recovery in global GDP is almost certain to prove a boost.

UK GDP in the fourth quarter slipped by 0.3pc. However, if the oil industry is stripped out, the economy only contracted 0.1pc. This highlights the economic problems caused by the slump in North Sea oil production.

Output of oil and gas has been hit not only by reservoir depletion, but a series of production shuts-ins and maintenance work caused by creaking infrastructure.

“Oil output averaged 1.1m barrels per day (bpd) in 2011, Caroline Bain of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) explains.

The EIU expects UK oil output would have fallen by about 15pc in 2012.

The prospects for 2013 are not encouraging with problems already evident with the Brent pipeline and the expected closure of the Schiehallion field,” Ms Bain notes. “Oil output is on a declining trend in the UK as new fields are failing to offset the rapid decline of mature fields, but expected and unexpected maintenance at North Sea fields led to a particularly weak oil production outcome in 2012.

“On the gas front, UK output was down nearly 14pc in the first 10 months of the year according to the IEA, and again there is little prospect of a turnaround in 2013,” she notes.

The price of Brent has also been rising for the last two months, which also has the effect of crimping GDP because of its inflationary effect.

Copper, the most economically sensitive metal because of its many uses, had a downbeat end to the week, hit by US data.

US home sales dropped 7.3pc in December, which was significantly worse than expected.

However, China is a more important price driver and Asian demand is expected to rise. “We expect that, despite high copper stocks, net copper imports into China will likely remain elevated in the first half of 2013, with some re-stocking taking place at the consumer level,” Deutsche Bank said last week.

“This may result in copper prices approaching $9,000 per tonne in the second quarter.” The price now stands at $8,030 a tonne.

View the original article here

Continue

Commodities: Mixed messages from gold as lengthy bull run suffers a touch of jitters

The yellow metal faced more bad PR the following day, as it emerged that billionaire investor George Soros has cut his stake in the SPDR Gold Trust, a huge exchange-traded fund (ETF) backed by gold, by 55pc.

So could gold be losing some of its lustre after a 12-year bull run?

Not at the world’s central banks, at least, according to the WGC report. Their net purchases reached a 48-year high at 534.6 tonnes, climbing by 17pc on the previous year.

Last year saw Brazil, Paraguay, Iraq and Venezuela join those nations building up their gold reserves, continuing the trend for those countries ramping up their official gold holdings to be found in developing markets.

That, of course, reflects their economic progress, since rising currency reserves prompt countries to look for ways to diversify their wealth away from the dollar and the euro.

Russia remained a big spender, adding around 75 tonnes through gold produced at home, meaning its reserves are now the seventh largest globally, trailing Switzerland in sixth place.

Separate data from the Intentional Monetary Fund, compiled by Bloomberg, reinforced that purchasing power. Over the past decade, Russia’s central bank has added 570 tonnes of the metal, a quarter more than China, the second-biggest gold buyer.

To put that in context, that extra gold in Russian vaults is roughly equivalent in weight to three Statues of Liberty.

Still, central bank buying only accounted for 12pc of total market demand last year, even if that was a rise from the 10pc in 2011. Demand from other investors was more mixed.

ETFs and similar products enjoyed a 51pc rise in demand at 279 tonnes, a bounce-back from a poor 2011. But demand for gold bars and coins moved in the opposite direction, dropping 17pc to 1,255.6 tonnes.

Since demand in this area had grown from under $3.6bn in 2003 to $76.6bn in 2011 in dollar terms, the WGC argued that perhaps it was “not surprising” that it had tapered off last year.

Nonetheless, it meant that overall demand in the investment sector dropped 10pc to 1,534.6 tonnes.

The amount of gold bought in jewellery form also fell, down by 3pc to 1,908.1 tonnes, The biggest drop-off was seen in India, as a weak rupee limited consumers’ purchasing power. In the West, gold-plated silver is growing in popularity as consumers in slumping economies are faced with higher prices.

The drag from the weak global economy could also been seen in demand for gold to use in technology – from electronics and other industrial uses, to dentistry – which dropped 5pc overall, to 428.2 tonnes, marking a second year of decline. That was “largely indicative of lacklustre sentiment in key markets,” said the WGC.

No one is calling an end to gold’s bull run. But what it all serves to remind us is that while economic clouds can help drive investors towards the metal, they -may be having the reverse impact on other, equally important buyers.

A turning point looms in the oil market. Imports of light crude oil into the refineries on the Gulf coast of the US have more than halved over the past three years, driven by rising oil production from America’s shale fields.

That will continue, say analysts at Barclays. They expect the level of imports rapidly to drop to “irrelevant” levels.

As a result, the market on the US Gulf coast will become driven by domestic rather than international competition Because of this, they think that the price of WTl, America’s benchmark crude (shown above), faces a “long-run” discount to Brent, London’s benchmark, of $15 a barrel.

Cynthia Carroll offered some industry insights as she presided over FTSE 100 giant Anglo American’s results on Friday, her last as chief executive of the miner.

Did she agree with the consensus that a sea-change is taking place, as companies switch their focus from growth and M&A to running existing assets efficiently?

She did - “we’ve got to strike the right balance between returning to shareholders in the short term and investing in the long-term business” – but had something to say to critics of her management of Anglo’s vast iron ore growth project in Brazil, Minas-Rio.

Carroll had followed a mandate to pursue iron ore, she said, adding: “We didn’t have attempted acquisitions and then failed acquisitions, unlike some of our competitors.”

No names were mentioned, but look to BHP Billiton’s $40bn (£26bn) bid for Potash Corp, blocked by Canada. Not to mention write-downs detailed by Rio Tinto on recent Mozambique purchases, which cost CEO Tom Albanese his job.

As for what’s next for Carroll, she said she was “not going away” from the commodities business.

View the original article here

Continue

'Davos' activists attack at home of Glencore chief Ivan Glasenberg and Credit Suisse branch

Police confirmed on Friday that attacks had been made on a postbox in Rueschlikon on Lake Zurich and a Credit Suisse branch in the upmarket residential area of Hottingen in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Glencore confirmed an incident had taken place on the property of Mr Glasenberg, who is in Davos attending the World Economic Forum.

Credit Suisse said a security window of its branch had been shattered. Police said the damage, caused by an unidentified explosive device, amounted to several thousand francs.

A spokesman for Zurich police said investigations were continuing into who was behind the attacks and what had caused the explosions.

No-one was injured in either attack.

An unnamed group posted a letter on the indymedia.ch website claiming responsibility for the attacks. The letter said the group had targeted Credit Suisse and Mr Glasenberg due to their support of the WEF.

In the letter, the activists criticised poor working conditions at Glencore and said it had targeted Credit Suisse for a host of reasons, including food price speculation, mass job losses and "betting against the Greek people".

Glencore's 2011 stock market flotation has led to increased scrutiny by environmental and anti-corruption campaigners over its involvement in mining operations in countries from Zambia to Colombia.

Until the listing, Glasenberg, who grew up in South Africa and became CEO in 2002, had lived with his family in relative anonymity in Rueschlikon, a lakeside town about 6 km from Zurich where he moved in 1994.

In 2011, left-wing activists claimed responsibility for a small explosion that broke windows at a hotel in Davos without hurting anybody.

At the time, a group calling itself Revolutionary Perspective said in a statement on an activist website it had targeted the ski resort's luxury Posthotel with a fire bomb as Swiss ministers and representatives of top bank UBS UBSN.VX were staying there.

Source: Reuters

View the original article here

Continue

'Davos' activists attack home of Glencore chief Ivan Glasenberg and Credit Suisse branch

Police confirmed on Friday that attacks had been made on a postbox in Rueschlikon on Lake Zurich and a Credit Suisse branch in the upmarket residential area of Hottingen in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Glencore confirmed an incident had taken place on the property of Mr Glasenberg, who is in Davos attending the World Economic Forum.

Credit Suisse said a security window of its branch had been shattered. Police said the damage, caused by an unidentified explosive device, amounted to several thousand francs.

A spokesman for Zurich police said investigations were continuing into who was behind the attacks and what had caused the explosions.

No-one was injured in either attack.

An unnamed group posted a letter on the indymedia.ch website claiming responsibility for the attacks. The letter said the group had targeted Credit Suisse and Mr Glasenberg due to their support of the WEF.

In the letter, the activists criticised poor working conditions at Glencore and said it had targeted Credit Suisse for a host of reasons, including food price speculation, mass job losses and "betting against the Greek people".

Glencore's 2011 stock market flotation has led to increased scrutiny by environmental and anti-corruption campaigners over its involvement in mining operations in countries from Zambia to Colombia.

Until the listing, Glasenberg, who grew up in South Africa and became CEO in 2002, had lived with his family in relative anonymity in Rueschlikon, a lakeside town about 6 km from Zurich where he moved in 1994.

In 2011, left-wing activists claimed responsibility for a small explosion that broke windows at a hotel in Davos without hurting anybody.

At the time, a group calling itself Revolutionary Perspective said in a statement on an activist website it had targeted the ski resort's luxury Posthotel with a fire bomb as Swiss ministers and representatives of top bank UBS UBSN.VX were staying there.

Source: Reuters

View the original article here

Continue