It’s been a good year for some, but a bad one for more. Retail continued to struggle, property likewise, while corporate finance hibernated. Neil Tague straps himself in to report on an up-and-down year for North West business.
JANUARY
The year starts with… a JJB story.
Get used to it. Knight in shining
armour David Jones, newly knighted
in the New Years Honours List, drafts
in former Selfridges man Peter Williams,
although Chris Ronnie remains as chief
executive. Shares leap 68 per cent.
Nicky Campbell makes an early bid for Trooper of the Year. Asked in a Media Guardian interview about his commitment to the MediaCity project, he beams “it’s not as if I’m going to Helmand province”, adding: “ When people say such and such a programme can't be done in Manchester we just look like arses.” DJ Mark Radcliffe reckons staff may go into shock if there’s not a Waitrose onsite, so news later in the year that Booth’s will open there should be yet more popular.
The Co-operative Financial Services is to merge with Britannia to create the UK’s largest mutual, good news at the start of a year in which the Co-op will provide some welcome cheer, winning the green vote in particular for its funky new headquarters masterplan.
FEBRUARY
The Creative
Industries Development
Service, set up
in Manchester in 2000
to develop creative
agencies in Greater
Manchester, is to close.
The Northwest Regional
Development Agency
(NWDA) is to appoint a
single region-wide body
to this all-important task
though, so skinny latte
vendors can rest easy.
Cash Generator in Bolton announces record profits, up 9 per cent to £22.6m. Chief executive Julian Urry tells Insider that pawn broking is only a tiny part of the business, leading to a rethink from the “pawn star” headline that had been a working title.
MARCH
There’s an atmosphere of hard
(sort of) work in Cannes as the MIPIM
property exhibition receives half the
visitors of recent years. The Manchester
stand’s full, while the poor souls staffing
the Liverpool stand look a little forlorn.
The Eternitas fund is set up by a cabal of North West turnaround and insolvency specialists. The venture is seeking an investment commitment of £20m over five years. A source quips “Eternitas – it’s Latin for Endless.”
The Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme, mocked since its launch in January, receives the backing of Alastair Campbell, which is nice. In Manchester for the IoD’s annual conference, he also says the Capital Enterprise Fund will work. Whatever that is.
APRIL
As cities scramble for the public
sector relocations that could put the
smiles back on the faces of property
people, Manchester and
Liverpool throw their
hats into the ring for
the Ministry of Justice
relocation. What’s more,
the Mayfield railway
station site next to
Piccadilly station is later
put forward as a site for
a proposed Whitehall
of the North civil service
super-campus, leading
to some quite splendid huffing from
Scouse business leaders, including
(somewhat inevitably) Frank McKenna.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development publishes its White List of jurisdictions that have “substantially implemented” internationally agreed tax standards, which put the Isle of Man in the clear. Insider’s visits to the island find some hurt and anger at the island’s pariah status, but maybe, with the local economy still expanding, they should just enjoy the good times.
MAY
Do you laugh or cry?
Brendan Flood’s Modus
Ventures is effectively
killed off when HBOS
puts it in administration.
Four days earlier
the football club largely
bankrolled by Flood,
Burnley FC, won
promotion to the superrich
Premier League.
Who said football was
a financial black hole?
Manchester, having insisted throughout its ill-fated Transport Innovation Fund bid that “there is no plan B” comes up with plan B. The ten Greater Manchester boroughs will all commit 40 per cent of their transport grants to the £1.4bn scheme, while council tax will also be increased. Manchester is also to pilot city region status along with Leeds, a fact that is trumpeted briefly before virtually every other place in the country is granted similar status later in the year.
JUNE
Lancastrian entrepreneur Matthew
Riley hits the jackpot, netting £80m
in the sale of Daisy Communications,
the business he set up in the
wake of the dot-com crash in 2001.
The business floats on AIM through
the reverse takeover of Freedom4.
Peter Emerson Jones – “The Chairman” who commands a property empire admired far beyond its Cheshire heartland – is crowned Insider’s Property Personality of the Year. He tells the audience that the US is picking up, so we could be on the way out of recession – he got the first bit right and can hardly be blamed for the second.
JULY
A contretemps blows up over a
Manchester City campaign featuring
Carlos Tevez and with
the words ‘Welcome
to Manchester’ –
surely jokes about
United not being
Mancunian last raised
a laugh sometime in
the mid-1990s? City
boss Mark Hughes
declares it to be “a bit
of fun”, while Sir Alex
Ferguson harrumphs
“they are a small club
with a small mentality”.
Presumably, he will
now be requesting the
removal of the Old Trafford banner
detailing the number of years since
City last won a trophy.
Robert Hough is unsurprisingly named as the new chairman of the NWDA. Hough steps back from his involvement with Peel Holdings, while outgoing chairman Bryan Gray finds a nice fit as chairman of Peel’s MediaCity.
AUGUST
Grosvenor, tiptoeing
towards the door
marked Exit in Preston,
entrenches itself further
into Liverpool, picking
up the bits and pieces
of a site previously
occupied by local institution
Rapid Hardware,
now at home in the
George Henry Lee store.
A spat between Irish glass makers Quinn and Ardagh Glass that has been played out in the region reaches something of a satisfactory conclusion. No one says that Quinn’s Elton factory isn’t best in class, but it was built without a full planning permission, a fact Ardagh has pursued doggedly for five years, although it’s never stopped them using the bottling facilities there to fulfil its own contracts. Takes all kinds, eh.
SEPTEMBER
As if having
Blackpool and
Blackburn councils
ganging up to
scupper its shopping
centre wasn’t
enough, Preston
may lose the
National Football
Museum to
Manchester.
The museum
opened in 2001 but
has run into funding
difficulties, while
Manchester sees an opportunity to
pull punters into its Urbis museum
and bring in an established brand that
will improve its reputation as a sporting
hotbed. The battle continues.
BAE Systems announces job cuts, with 1,000 set to go at three North West locations. But there’s better news for Liverpool as Indian conglomerate Tata announces that Jaguar Land Rover’s Halewood plant will be chosen to make the Baby Range Rover, or LRX for the petrolheads. Also causing Merseyside cheer is the performance of Home Bargains’ parent TJ Morris, now picking up awards more regularly than Ryan Giggs, and home shopping giant Shop Direct Group, which reports a whopping 182 per cent rise in underlying earnings to £96m.
Insider holds its second Business of Sport conference and its first Business of Media conference, at which Ten Alps chief executive Alex Connock is the star turn, declaring that the managers of the NWDA’s much-vaunted £140m Venture Capital and Loan Fund should be “put on the spot”, adding “the North West just hasn't got its act together when it comes to investing in media considering it's a key sector for the region.”
OCTOBER
Manchester slides below Birmingham
in the European Cities Monitor compiled
by consultancy Cushman & Wakefield,
dropping to 16th place. There’s soothing
talk from inward investment chiefs of
how much is still being achieved, with
some justification – but for all the
well-documented “post-bomb rebirth
and reinvention” of the city, it’s actually
lower now than in the 1990 survey,
which had it placed 13th.
Manchester restaurants being swamped by requests for receipts by virtually all members of large parties, regardless of who’s paying, can mean only one thing – a political party conference, in this case the Conservatives. Apart from populist stuff about localism – which will cut public sector waste how exactly? – the Tories promise very little, the main thrust being ‘we can’t do much because Labour have stuffed it up so badly’. Inspirational.
Andrew Simpson, group managing director at Peel Holdings, leaves his job, declaring that he had done the job he’d been brought in to do – this was reorganising the group into four distinct operating divisions, lest anyone mistakenly think it was being Peel supremo John Whittaker’s vein-popping front man leading the opposition to Manchester’s proposed congestion charge.
NOVEMBER
Peter Cowgill caps another good year
when Cowgill Holloway upset the big
four to be crowned advisory firm of the
year at the Insider Dealmakers. The JD
Sports Fashion empire he heads has
sailed serenely through another year in
which rivals Sports Direct and JJB have
floundered amid mounds of nylon. Still,
a World Cup year beckons, eh chaps?
Stobart Group also had a decent year. Time was spent battling off the attentions of a farmer who threatened to scupper the Carlisle Airport expansion and tying up rail freight deals in Scotland and Spain. They also won a £60m contract with Unilever.
United Utilities continues its disposal of non-core assets – it seems like we’ve been saying that for years – with the disposal of stakes in Northern Gas Networks and Philippines-based Manila Water Company, netting about £130m in the process. But United Utilities confirms its plans to cut up to 260 jobs.
Also in: December 2009
-
Strap yourselves in
We’ve called this year’s annual round-up a rollercoaster ride. And although for most people it has seemed just a rotten year, one that many are glad to see the back of, we feel justified in using such a metaphor. The year has provided highs for some, and though the ride still feels rocky, most businesses are over the shock induced by the banking collapse of October 2008.
-
Land ahoy
Martin Ainscough’s crane hire millions are supporting a business quietly making strides in land acquisition, reports Neil Tague.
-
Sir Mark Elder
The man tasked with turning around Manchester’s Hallé Symphony Orchestra tells Michael Taylor how his musicians are bringing classical music to a modern audience.