Outlook: Albert Fisher
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Your support makes all the difference.THE REWARDS for failure at Albert Fisher are even more succulent than its cook-in sauces. Neil England is departing with pounds 700,000 in his back pocket so as to make way for the company's third chief executive in four years.
Whether Terry Robinson, an ex-Lonrho man, will fare any better than his predecessors may depend more on luck than judgement. At least he has wisely chosen to dispense with yet more promises of recovery. At Albert Fisher these tend to have as brief a shelf live as its chief executives.
Advised at fabulous cost by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the board has told Mr Robinson to find someone else to run the businesses. All told, a third of the company - chilled food, European seafood and those cook-in sauces - is being put on the block in the hope that asset sales can unlock shareholder value in a way that successive managements have singularly failed to do. Turnover might still be north of pounds 1bn, making Albert Fisher one of the country's largest supermarket suppliers, but margins are derisory. So too is its stock market capitalisation, which has shrunk to pounds 54m, barely a tenth of its value four years ago.
Mr Robinson will be doing well to sell the businesses ear marked for disposal for their net asset value of pounds 90m. And perversely, even if he achieves that sum, the group will still be left swimming in red ink, albeit of the accounting variety, because of the resulting reversal of goodwill previously written off. Moreover, the businesses being disposed of are the few classy ones left in the larder. Mr Robinson will be left with some not very inspiring businesses, such as fresh produce, surviving on thin margins in fragmented markets.
The share price got there before the board did. Yesterday's clear-out accompanied by a passing of the final dividend and a pounds 20m pre-tax loss, was already factored in. At 8p, Albert Fisher has been reduced to no more than a speculative punt. Most shareholders are past caring whether one more throw of the dice does the trick.
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