Friday High Five – the best of the North West this week
There’s lots that I love about this job, but one of the regular delights is finding out about privately owned companies we’d never heard of before.
We got the scoop on Friday about a major toy and character distributor based at Walker Park in Blackburn called Heathside that has just been acquired by Saga Invest, a quirky German investor in the massive growth industry of pop culture collectibles.
The other thing we like doing is working an angle on a well-known business that other media don’t see in the same way we might.
That young upstart Joshi Herrmann at the insurgent media brand The Mill once referred to me as a veteran, which stung a bit at the time.
But we’ll take it.
One of the many things my fellow veteran colleague Neil Hodgson is very, very good at – way better than me – is seeing the story through the frantic fog of an early morning also full of noise and clutter.
Our lead story three days this week have been major companies announcing important things on the markets at 7am, often wrapped up in a word salad of baffling lingo and city-speak.
Neil fillets this stuff so well to draw out the true picture, as he did with PZ Cussons and Together Finance this week.
We’ve also seen this week the board of THG looking to start the next chapter of the company’s so far lamentable life as a stock market company by proposing a surprising strategic pivot: demerging Ingenuity, it’s engine at the heart of the business. The plan, as far as we know, is so it can concentrate on the cash generative Beauty and Nutrition bits of the business.
Who knows what goes on in the hive mind of founder Matthew Moulding? Or what gets talked about at strategy days and board meetings, but this is one that has definitely set the hares running in the City, and also amongst would be purchasers.
On our Rainmakers platform I dig a bit deeper and ask whether this is our attempt to second guess a misunderstood genius at work? Or just the latest blunder in the short history of the North’s most fascinating business soap opera? Or something else entirely.
Have a great weekend.
