Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Can Bowman do the same for ScottishPower as he did for Allied Domecq? Don't bet on it

They will presumably be drinking a dram or two in Glasgow tonight to Philip Bowman, the former Allied Domecq spirits supremo who is taking over as chief executive of ScottishPower. Ian Russell, the man he replaces, has been living on borrowed time ever since takeover talks with E.ON of Germany collapsed. These might have salvaged something from the wreckage of his two failed, strategic acquisitions, but it was not to be.

ScottishPower shares perked up 3 per cent yesterday as the stock market speculated that Mr Bowman might be the man to resurrect these talks. Just look at the £7.4bn he managed to prise out of Pernod Ricard for Allied Domecq last year. Surely he can be relied on to achieve similar value creation at ScottishPower?

Anyone who believes this must have been drinking the same stuff as Charles Miller Smith was on when the ScottishPower chairman gave Mr Russell his unequivocal public support last November. By that time, the search for a successor was already under way and yet Mr Miller Smith still chose to ladle the praise on his chief executive. The full and wholehearted support he gave Mr Russell fooled no one. This is what football club chairmen do just before the manager is given the boot.

Mr Russell was doing an "excellent" job, Mr Miller Smith again insisted yesterday. But Mr Bowman will do an even better one. Well maybe, but it is not immediately apparent why someone whose experience thus far has been confined to the drinks industry might excel in running a bog standard utility.

Mr Miller Smith says he's been appointed to bring "a fresh perspective" to ScottishPower, and there's no denying he'll do that. As for making the company more attractive to bidders, investors may have quite a wait. The Germans have recently hinted that they would still like to own the company, but they are not prepared to pay the 650p a share the board was demanding.

All of which means that Mr Bowman could be there for the long haul. Far from being one long Malibu on a sun-kissed Caribbean beach, running ScottishPower will primarily be about grinding down the costs. After the disasters of Mr Russell's reign, he won't even be allowed to go acquisition hunting. Cheers, Mr Bowman. Welcome to the glamourous new world of utilities.

Sainsbury's not out of woods quite yet

So champagne is outselling baked beans at J Sainsbury is it? This was the proud boast of the chief executive, Justin King, in an interview on BBC Radio Four's Today programme yesterday. On further inquiry, it turns out to be not quite the case. In fact sales of Etienne Dumont, a brand which was heavily price promoted over the Christmas period, outsold four packs of Heinz baked beans in a single week that includes the two peak selling days of the year for champagne - Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.

Deconstructed, it is in fact a rather unremarkable and meaningless statistic. Yet in all other respects, Mr King has good reason to boast. At 5.2 per cent, like-for-like sales growth in the Christmas quarter was the best in years for this one time laggard of the supermarkets sector, as well as being the fourth consecutive quarter of sales growth for Sainsbury's.

The hoped for turnaround cannot yet be declared accomplished, but Mr King seems definitively to have stopped the rot while at the same time putting Sainsbury's firmly on track to overtake Asda as Britain's second largest supermarkets group. Why, he may even have achieved better sales growth than the mighty Tesco over the Christmas period. We'll know the answer today, when Tesco reports its own performance.

The danger is that he's been too successful for his own good. Neither Tesco nor Asda is likely to allow the renaissance in Sainsbury's affairs to go unchallenged. A vicious price response is all too possible, particularly from Asda, whose parent company, Wal-Mart, will not be taking the setback in their UK offshoot's affairs lying down. Asda's Andy Bond has already signalled an escalation of the price war. Might head office in Bentonville allow him to invest the whole of his profits in price promotion? Don't altogether discount it.

As it is, Mr King's sales growth is being achieved at a terrible cost to margins. Wisely, he's made margin improvement a target only for the latter stages of his three year turnaround strategy, when operational gearing should come through strongly. Yet in the meantime sales promotion is playing merry havoc with the bottom line. I've no idea how universal these promotions are, but the issue of vouchers that give £6 off any shop in excess of £60, this on top of existing price discounts, does not come cheap. Sainsbury's is paying through the nose to persuade the customer back.

At some stage the margin erosion has to be reversed if Mr King is to justify the earnings multiple on his share price, which at roughly double that of Tesco discounts a very considerable recovery in profits. Sainsbury's is still at such a severe competitive disadvantage to Tesco on so many fronts that investors may be getting ahead of themselves in thinking the company already out of the woods. There's certainly cause for celebration here, but for the time being it might be better to crack open the baked beans. The champagne has to wait a bit.

HMV sinks as Carphone surges

Here's a tale of two retailers. While HMV is being steadily disintermediated by the internet - who's going to buying books from the high street, never mind CDs and DVDs, 10 years from now? - Carphone Warehouse goes from strength to strength. This is not just because mobile phones are still a growth business. In theory it should be just as possible to buy the latest mobile phone online as anything else. In any case, other copycat versions of Carphone, such as the Link, are bombing. So what's the secret of Carphone's success?

The contrast could scarcely be greater. Carphone's like-for-like sales were up 7.1 per cent in the Christmas trading period while profits are expected to be at the top end of market expectations. At HMV Music Stores, like-for-like sales for the UK and Ireland plummeted 5.5 per cent.

The picture at Waterstone's, also owned by HMV Group, wasn't much better. Both stand in the frontline as the broadband juggernaut scatters all before it. There may always be some kind of a place for bookselling on the high street, though not in its present, oversupplied form. Yet it is hard to see any future at all for the music stores unless radically recreated in a different form.

In these circumstances, it's just fiddling while Rome burns to have Alan Giles, the chief executive, hang around until the end of the year in an attempt to persuade the authorities to allow the takeover of Ottakar's. This is a defensive acquisition which fails to provide a long term solution to the structural bind HMV finds itself in. While HMV quarrels with the Competition Commission, the world outside is changing with dramatic speed. The peril is too great for a caretaker chief executive. The face saving notice period being allowed to Mr Giles is no good to anyone.

And Carphone Warehouse? No chance of being left behind by a changing world there. Charles Dunstone, the chief executive, modestly puts his achievement down to commitment rather than cleverness, yet there is plainly more to it than that. He's about the only retailer I know of where 60 per cent of the revenue is earned after the customer leaves the shop, this because he gets a share of contract revenues.

More important still, he's trusted to steer the customer through the maze of different mobile phone packages and secure the one that best suits the need. Maybe one day Mr Dunstone will also find himself being disintermediated by whatever the latest technology might then be, but for the time being, he's sitting pretty and never seems to miss a trick. Who, other than Mr Dunstone, would have thought of buying up virtually the entire stock of pink Motorola Razrs for Christmas or had the connections to do so.

j.warner@independent.co.uk