Member Info for Slownsteady

If this continues, the Momentum wallahs will start loading up.

Thanks. But has the sp (up 75% in 3 months) discounted all this?

(Source: Times online)

Standard Chartered has become a takeover target after the biggest lender in the United Arab Emirates confirmed it had been considering a multibillion-pound bid for the FTSE 100 bank.
Shares in Standard Chartered rose by up to 20 per cent yesterday after it emerged that First Abu Dhabi Bank had looked at an offer for the London-based group but was no longer pursuing the idea.
A deal would have created an emerging markets-focused banking giant with assets of more than $1 trillion, although it would have been tricky to pull off given the scrutiny such it would have attracted from regulators.

However, the aborted bid highlights Standard Chartered’s vulnerability to a takeover.

Accompanied by a Rights issue, so 15:1 needs to be adjusted for that. I think I worked it out as c 8:1.
The Chairman put cash in at c 21p and absorbed the balance of the Rights issue @c. 11p. This is my vague recollection.

Hang on to your hats. This will get others sniffing. I have always felt it is ripe for a takeover by someone wanting a readymade presence in the potentially fastest growing market in the world, once this covid business is behind us.
It certainly is the biggest holding in our Portfolios, bought at £4.89

I make it 18p? Roughly, divide by 8 if I recall correctly.

My guess is they have made good progress in paying down the debt, and as someone said, Cruise Bookings appear to be going well.
Certainly, it gives me great comfort that the Chairman is back on board. If I were in his shoes, I'd make sure the debt was a top priority.

Ermm Checkin... which is why I specifically said the "Investment team" (born 1985). Not the Back Office or Board of Directors. The most impressive appear to be the Compliance consultant (not actually an employee) and the Marketing person.
It's a bog standard Long/Short Hedge Fund, with working Offices in London. not Cornwall, which appears to be the Registered address.

Hehehe Ianian, there appears to be a lot of 'pivoting' - and other woo woo stuff - going on in their blurb. :-)
Well, I for one wish them every luck in reaching their valuation of £6!

Never having heard of them, I looked up these Kernow people who have taken the declarable share in Saga. Not impressed. The Investment team look like a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears teenage scribblers.
There's a lot of management consultant jargon and gobbledygook waffle in their Report below, but page 26 talks about Saga.

https://kernowam.com/documents/The%20Kernow%20Journal%20-%20Series%201,%20Volume%201.pdf

Touching wood a hundred times... anyways, the sp is up over 5% this morning.

Or poker... she is pouring our money into a ship that has already sailed?

No I hadn't see it Daniel. Surprised you had access to it on Saturday.
That was a lot of time and effort for little appreciation! :-)

(From: Sunday Times)
Turquoise Hill investors agree to $3bn Rio Tinto bid
Saturday December 10 2022, 12.01am, The Times
The deal will give Rio Tinto control of the Oyu Tolgoi coppermine in Mongolia
Shareholders in Canada’s Turquoise Hill Resources yesterday voted in favour of Rio Tinto’s $3.3 billion bid to take it private and gain direct control over a giant Mongolian coppermine.
The iron ore producer will acquire the remaining 49 per cent it does not own in the Canadian miner, giving it control of the Oyu Tolgoi coppermine in Mongolia, in which Turquoise Hill has a 66 per cent stake.
Rio agreed with Turquoise Hill’s board on a C$43 per share offer in September but faced opposition from some investors. Rio struck a deal with two leading dissenting shareholders, Pentwater Capital Management and SailingStone Capital Partners, who agreed to abstain from the vote and enter into arbitration with Rio but the talks broke down.
Turquoise Hill said that at the special meeting, the deal was approved by approximately 86.6 per cent of all votes cast as well as by approximately 60.5 per cent of the shares voted by minority shareholders.

But it was all too little, too late for Read, who was well liked among staff but lacked the ability to inspire.
Some argue that he tried to turn Vodafone into a global conglomerate and profit from overlaps in different countries. From the global headquarters in Paddington in central London, Read and co oversaw this sprawling jigsaw puzzle. Some believe the Paddington HQ should be shut, leaving just its former headquarters in Newbury, Berkshire.
“A lot of people start out with the experiment of building an international telco, with synergies across multiple countries. It was one of the big bets for Nick,” said a senior industry source.
“But it is proven in the telecoms industry that this doesn’t work. The likes of Telia, Telenor AT&T — everyone has tried in some shape or form to create synergies across countries, and for many reasons it just doesn’t fly.”
Read’s successor will be expected to take a much bolder approach. Finance boss Margherita Della Valle is taking charge temporarily, but the board is more likely to seek an outsider as the permanent chief executive.
The board has already begun approaching potential candidates. Dutchman Olaf Swantee, the former boss of EE and Swiss business Sunrise, is in the running. He had a short stint as a non-executive director at Vodafone last year. Other potential candidates include Allison Kirkby, the BT board director who runs Sweden’s Telia; Virgin Media O2’s chief executive, Lutz Schüler; and Stephen Carter, the Informa boss who is on Vodafone’s board and who ran the industry regulator Ofcom.
Aviva Investors’ Green said: “If the board wants an external candidate, then they could look no further than the template of BT. In recruiting Philip Jansen, they hired an industry outsider with a great track record of delivering for shareholders, which brought some urgency to the company. The status quo is clearly unacceptable to the board and to shareholders, and something more radical is required to turn around the apathy shown by investors for years.”
He said a new chief executive could put pressure on regulators with “bolder” deals and “proper, ground-breaking consolidation”. Green added: “This will require dynamic and bold thinking, where there are no sacred cows and they focus on fewer markets but can achieve higher returns.”
Xavier Niel has always viewed himself as an outsider, but has become a leading figure in French business through his ownership of Iliad, the telecoms giant behind Free mobile.
Niel, 55, was a school dropout who spent his teenage years as a computer hacker, when his talents were spotted by the French security service. Years later, Niel admitted hacking the phone of the late President Mitterrand.
In the 1980s, he helped create Minitel, the computer service dubbed the France-Wide Web. In 2004, he was arrested on charges, in effect, of pimping because he part-owned several sex shops and peep shows. Niel was cleared of the charges but a tax fraud earned him a two-year suspended sent

A few weeks later, Read completed a deal to sell up to 50 per cent of Vodafone’s controlling stake in Vantage Towers, its €14.8 billion mobile phone masts business, through a joint venture. The board had hoped the deal would bolster flagging shareholder sentiment to buoy the company through what they knew would be disappointing financial results being published the following week. The plan failed; the Vantage sale was complex, with strings attached, leaving investors underwhelmed.
When Read then lowered full-year profit guidance a few days later due to the operational blunders in Germany, the shares tumbled and his days were numbered. “The main issue is not actually M&A [mergers and acquisitions], it’s more operations,” said a former senior insider. “Vodafone is not operating at its real potential.”
The debts that the Liberty deal heaped on Vodafone have piled more pressure on it to go further to offload underperforming parts of its sprawling empire.
The largest four parts of the business are: Germany, which makes up nearly a third of group turnover, including fixed-line and mobile; the UK, which generates 14 per cent of turnover; Italy, 11 per cent; and Spain, which makes up 9 per cent.
Vodafone is in talks to create a joint venture with mobile rival Three in the UK, but those discussions are dragging on as a complex structure is thrashed out. It missed out on a deal to beef up in Spain as France’s Orange swooped in to merge with MasMovil in the country. That deal left Vodafone as the smallest of the remaining three mobile operators in Spain. It is now also the third-largest operator in Germany, the UK and Italy, having previously been the largest or second largest in most countries at the peak of its powers two decades ago after its frenetic and ill-fated deals spree.
Now, there are seven other European countries that make up just 13 per cent of revenues: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Albania. There are also three countries that Vodafone defines as “other markets”: Turkey, Ghana and Egypt. It also has a 60 per cent stake in Vodacom, the African business listed in Johannesburg.
“Right off the bat, you’d sell the ten smallest companies which make up 10 per cent of the enterprise value of the business. Those are not small businesses but they’re small in the Vodafone context,” said a rival telecoms executive.
Others point to opportunities to leave far-flung markets such as Australia. The company has been in talks to sell its Ghanaian business since July, but there has been no announcement about a deal. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Etisalat was eyeing Vodafone’s controlling stake in Vodacom.
Read did manage to get some deals over the line. In August, he agreed to sell the Hungarian business for €1.8 billion, while he struck the Vantage deal last month, just a year after floating it in Frankfurt — though this was criticised for being another complex transaction.

“Reviewing the geographical spread to create a focused European footprint, as well as radically improving efficiency, should be the next steps,” he told The Sunday Times. “These actions should return Vodafone to its successful roots as a star European asset, create value for all stakeholders and lead to a revamped equity story.”
He added: “The right candidate must be ready to take action and to rapidly implement significant change to return Vodafone to greatness.”
And after dumping its stake in Vodafone, making a complete exit a couple of months ago, Cevian is already considering a possible return to the shareholder register. A source close to the firm said it continued to see significant long-term potential in a restructuring of Vodafone and could take up the case again.
Read, the former chief financial officer, took over in October 2018 from Vittorio Colao, the Italian who went on to become digital minister in his home country. Colao was hailed for selling Vodafone’s 45 per cent stake in US business Verizon Wireless for $130 billion in 2014, which reaped huge rewards for shareholders.
However, his €18.4 billion takeover of Liberty Global’s cable assets in Germany and central and eastern Europe, just before he stepped down, left Read with a big headache. Not only did it saddle Vodafone with huge debts, which stood at more than €45 billion (£39 billion) at the end of September, but problems soon emerged in the German business.
At the time of the deal in 2018, the German arm was growing at a rate of 5 per cent, making it the jewel in the crown. But then the business hit the buffers and went into reverse. The German fixed-line business makes up a fifth of Vodafone’s entire profits, making it the key cog in the global machine.
One big problem was a new telecoms law in Germany that forced housing associations, with which Vodafone has deals, to stop bundling cable TV in with rental fees. That meant a wave of customers switched off when they weren’t forced to pay for the service. On a call with analysts last month, Read conceded that the company had “dropped the ball” on the new telecoms law.
Trevor Green, head of UK equities at Aviva Investors, a top 15 Vodafone shareholder, said Read had received a “hospital pass” in the form of the Liberty deal, inheriting a “highly indebted business, reducing his strategic options”.
The Liberty deal came just before a Europe-wide race to build fibre for broadband, rather than old-fashioned cable, which led Virgin Media to upgrade its cable network in the UK to fibre. In Germany, Vodafone, too, has had to upgrade its cable network to keep pace with the competition.
Vodafone Deutschland’s chief executive, Hannes Ametsreiter, left in the summer after seven years in charge. He was replaced by Philippe Rogge, a former Microsoft executive. In October, there was a review of the German business that thrashed out a much simpler plan.
A few weeks later, Read completed a deal to sell up to 50 per cent of Vodafone’s

How Vodafone ousted boss Nick Read — and what its activist investor wants next
French tycoon Xavier Niel has laid out his blueprint for the struggling telecoms giant, while investor Cevian eyes a comeback
Sunday December 11 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
As nervous England fans settled into their seats for the team’s knockout game against Senegal last Sunday, Vodafone’s directors assembled in front of their computer screens.
The Belgian chairman of the FTSE 100 telecoms giant, Jean-François van Boxmeer, had called a virtual board meeting and waited for the two-hour slot between France and England’s matches to hold the talks. The former Heineken boss transmitted a simple message to his directors: it was time for the company to hang up on Nick Read, the under-pressure chief executive.
Van Boxmeer had held a discussion with Read a few days earlier in which they agreed a new chief executive was needed to improve the company’s operational performance, speed up deals and, ultimately, revive the ailing share price.
On the virtual call, van Boxmeer’s fellow directors agreed with the verdict and it came as no surprise to anyone who dialled in. The board broke the news to senior executives at half-time in the England match so as not to interrupt the game, before announcing it publicly at 7am the following morning.
The decision brought the curtain down on a 20-year career at Vodafone. However, the final four of those years, when Read was in charge, had become increasingly difficult as he grappled with huge debts and an unwieldy empire on the wane.
Read, 58, was slow to execute on deals in countries such as Spain and the key German division was misfiring. The pressure was also mounting from a new set of vocal investors.
It emerged this year that Cevian Capital, Europe’s largest activist investor, had built up a stake to become a top ten Vodafone shareholder and wanted Read to offload struggling divisions. Then in May, Abu Dhabi’s Etisalat, which recently rebranded as “e&”, bought a near-10 per cent stake for £3.3 billion. The top shareholder said it was confident the company could improve its performance operationally through “other potential strategic transactions”.
A few months later in September, another troublemaker arrived on the register. French telecoms tycoon Xavier Niel snapped up a 2.5 per cent stake worth £750 million through his Atlas Investissement vehicle.
It was the board, rather than the vocal shareholders, who made the final call on Read. But it is those shareholders that are now calling on the new chief to dial up the speed of the deals to simplify Vodafone, whose share price has nearly halved under Read.
This weekend, in a rare set of public comments, Niel said Vodafone had become “too fat, too slow, too complex”. He said it “must move fast” to slim down and slash debt by “selling infrastructure

Sorry to ask as I know this has been discussed ad nauseum, but there are too many posts to wade through.... I take it this includes Goodwill?

So have I. I would expect a divi cut with the new ceo (don't they all?), but there's plenty of value here.