In just four months under Siebe’s management, the unit’s margins widened by two percentage points to 5.5 per cent. While other engineering companies grapple with the strong pound and the economic upheaval in the Far East, Siebe could hardly have sounded more confident.
Sceptics had viewed the acquisition of troubled process engineer APV last May as a sign that Siebe was running out of steam Not so. Trading on a 40 per cent discount to the market, HR shares, ahead 2p at 225p, look good value.. Barrie Stephens can retire a contented man. It still has its fair share of problems, with the pensions market struggling to shrug off the damage done by the mis-selling scandal, and HR is likely to be forced to dispose of some of the worst performing bits.UBS forecasts full-year profits of pounds 29m, putting the shares on a prospective PE ratio of 10. In 33 years the long- serving Siebe chairman, who presented his last set of results to the City yesterday, has taken the industrial controls and appliances group from a tiddler with annual sales of pounds 1.4m to a global engineering giant turning over more than pounds 3bn

On yesterday’s evidence, that progress should continue. After earmarking pounds 15m for an earnings-enhancing share buy-back it reckons it has another pounds 65m up its sleeve, with travel businesses in North America and the Far East on the shopping list.

The logic goes that HR will be able to win much more business if it can offer customers a travel service with global spread.The one potential black spot is the financial services division. After a few hiccups Bennett, its Scandinavian travel agent, is performing well. The market for business travel is growing strongly and by securing more fee-based work the group is better placed than most to cope with a move by airlines to cut commissions to agents.With pounds 37.5m in the bank HR also has the financial fire-power to launch an acquisition spree. and the company is clearly still vulnerable to currency and raw material price movements.”Philip Morrish, chemicals analyst with Nikko, said the strong results proved the Hercules bid was a non-starter, although Allied was unlikely to remain independent..

Hogg Robinson’s share price has never recovered after the business travel to financial services group stunned investors with a profits warning last January. However yesterday’s results, which showed a 21 per cent rise in underlying pre-tax profits to pounds 14.5m for the six months to September, suggest it is on the road to recovery. The transport division, which had proved to be the group’s Achilles’ heel over the last few years, has finally been off-loaded to its management team. Given the division’s dwindling earnings, the pounds 23m HR got for selling the business looks a good price.
HR is left with a fast-growing business travel subsidiary with excellent prospects.

Keith Elliott, chairman and chief executive of Hercules, said: “Sales are down on a like-for-like basis, return on capital continues to decline … Schroders, Allied’s brokers, blamed an administrative error.
Hercules called the handling of the results “shambolic” and said it was considering taking up the matter with the Takeover Panel. A spokesman for Allied said: “We are not embarrassed by the facts that have been revealed and stand by them.”David Farrar, Allied’s chief executive, claimed that the 52.1 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to pounds 32m for the six months to September would act as “a springboard on which to launch a strong defence”.However Hercules yesterday proclaimed it was “underwhelmed” by the new figures and said they were at the bottom of analysts’ expectations. It was red faces all round yesterday at Allied Colloids, the chemicals group attempting to fend off a pounds 1.1bn hostile bid from US rival Hercules, when it issued the wrong interim results statement to the Stock Exchange.

The original statement gave away facts Allied is likely to raise in its impending defence document. In it Allied predicted that exchange rates and raw material costs were unlikely to rise in the next six months and that overheads had risen slower than sales. However, the talks, which formed part of BSkyB’s drive to invest in original programming, did not come to fruition.. At present, the Independent Television Commission allows such programming on cable and satellite television, but will consider next spring whether magazine brands could be extended on to terrestrial television.
The move comes two months after news that Emap was talking to Richard Branson’s Virgin Century Television about putting magazines such as FHM and Just Seventeen on television.Chrysalis, which reported a 65 per cent reduction in pre-tax losses to pounds 1.9m for the year to the end of August, also revealed that BSkyB had approached the company about taking a stake in its television production interests. Chrysalis Group, the television, radio and music company, is talking to Conde Nast, owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair, about turning some of the publisher’s best known magazines into television programmes.