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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
MainFT, yesterday:
Tate & Lyle has agreed to be bought by US rival Ingredion in a £2.7bn deal that will create a major global ingredients business while seeing another FTSE stalwart leave the London stock market.
[…]
Tate & Lyle is one of the longest-standing members of the London Stock Exchange and the only founding constituent of the FT-30 index, formed in 1935, that is still listed today.
Is this a future FT Alphaville Pub Quiz question coming into being?
Possibly. Tate & Lyle (which does not make the eponymous sugars, a fact that in our experience often leads to newspaper image corrections) already has one highly-trivial claim to fame, as the company to have entered and exited the FTSE 100 the most times, with six additions and six demotions:
added in 1991, demoted 1993, re-added 1995, demoted 1997, re-added 2004, demoted 2007, re-added 2008, demoted 2008, re-added 2008, demoted 2009, re-added 2011, and demoted in 2014.
Assuming the takeover goes ahead, the active FTSE 100 hokey-cokey champion will be Hikma Pharmaceuticals. Hikma lost its spot among London’s blue-chips for the fifth time in March, supplanted by Georgian lender Lion Finance (shares in which have octupled in the past half-decade).
But a question has surfaced within the dark pools of our rat brain: is Tate & Lyle actually the only FT-30 member left?
According to the FT, which ought to know, the original constituents of the FT-30 were:
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We can see how one might immediately get a bit “well, actually” about this.
It’s understandably somewhat rare for major listed companies to completely disappear from the surface of the planet. In several instances the enterprises here are very much still alive, but have simply merged or been split into (sometimes listed) international conglomerates — including others on this list. Take for instance Distillers, which is now Diageo Scotland (Watney Combe & Reid is also in Diageo somewhere), or Vickers, now part of Rolls-Royce. Some of those subsequently ceased to operate, some survive as brands only.
But a few, we’d suggest, are arguably, kinda sorta, still directly traded — albeit in a Ship of Theseus kind of way:
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Imperial Tobacco was purchased in the mid-80s by serial acquirer Hanson Trust (now, circuitously, Heidelberg Materials, and also enmeshed in the saga of London Brick). But it was demerged in 1996, and has been publicly traded ever since.
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Coats (J & P) — following over a century of mergers, including one with Patons & Baldwins, and a 12-year spell as a private concern — is now simply Coats, a current member of the FTSE 250.
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Callenders Cables & Construction, having made acquisitions including Balfour Beatty, rebranded first as British Insulated Callender’s Cables (BICC), and, later, having sold its cabling operations, as Balfour Beatty — which remains listed.
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Whether you consider Rolls-Royce to still be listed kind of depends on whether you think it was a car company or an engine company in the mid-1930s. (We’d lean towards the former, but there’s a dull debate to be had.)
The other question is whether, by the logic that has apparently been applied to some of the exclusions, Tate & Lyle should have been dropped as a FT-30 survivor a long time ago? After all, it didn’t really diversify away from sugar until the second half of 20th century, and the sugar refining element was sold in 2010.
The other other question this raises is this: does any of this matter? The answer to that question is no.
Further reading:
— We made a chart of the FTSE’s biggest companies and nearly lost our minds
