Charlie Dimmock sold a gardening website the right to use her name in its promotions. TV veteran Sir David Frost also hopped on the bandwagon by joining the board of Newsplayer, an online video-on-demand scheme that remains deeply troubled.Mick Jagger lent his name to a series of web-related investments including Cyberia, supposedly the world’s first internet caf?He was in good company since George Soros and Lord Saatchi also piled in with financial backing.Bernard Arnault, the luxury goods billionaire, was another celebrity investor in the dot-com freak show. Through his europ web fund, the Frenchman invested in a string of basket cases in the making, including Boo .The UK travel site Deckchair managed to pull in the star power of Sir Bob Geldof, but the point where it all went too far was when even the Queen got bitten by the bubble bug. Getmapping , an ambitious and still operating site, sought to provide aerial photography over the net. The stock declined from the day it listed on AIM, but for one short but glorious moment, Her Majesty’s shrewd investment added another six-figure sum to her fortune.. Colin Matthews, chief executive of Hays, is to unveil plans to carve up the troubled support services company.
At Friday’s closing price of 72p a share, this would cost £190m.Hays has four divisions: personnel, logistics, mail services and commercial outsourcing.Before the downturn in the economy, Hays enjoyed a premium rating. But slowing demand for its services, combined with the profits warnings, has knocked investor confidence. Many analysts now see little point in the company owning a range of businesses with few synergies.The investment bank Merrill Lynch believes that the sum of Hays’s parts is worth between 97p and 111p a share. “Now that the group’s premium rating has gone, there seems little rationale for Hays to exist in its present form,” Merrill Lynch said in a recent report on the company.It is understood that the first division to be sold off will be logistics, where Hays has seen its margins almost halve since 1996. Well-placed sources said that Hays’s financial adviser, Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, has already contacted possible bidders for the business, which could fetch between £250m and £400m.
Analysts believe Holland’s TPG and quoted logistics companies Exel and Tibbett & Britten are possible buyers.Hays’s mail division is also expected to get the chop. In recent months it has faced increased competition from Royal Mail, which, despite its own financial troubles, has become more commercially aggressive.But Hays’s personnel arm is expected to be safe from the disposals. The division has 300 branches and provides recruitment services to companies. While the sector has been hard hit by the economic downturn, Hays’s personnel arm has achieved consistent double-digit earnings growth and Merrill Lynch estimates that it is worth between £950m and £1.2bn.. If a whole group of people go for a pizza, they’ll often buy a great big one and share. That’s unless they go to Pizza Express, where the pizzas are just that little bit smaller and everyone has to order one each.
