Time to halt foreign takeover (From Daily Echo)

Time to halt foreign takeover

2:12pm Friday 2nd July 2010 in Hampshire Business By Gareth Lewis, Business Editor

Time to halt foreign takeover

BAA, ABP, P&O, SPI LASERS. NO, IT’S NOT a chimpanzee at the keyboard, but a sobering list for Hampshire businesses.

And it continues: Raymarine, Insensys, Hanson, Point Source, WestQuay Shopping Centre, Smiths Aerospace, Moody Yachts, Genetix, Solvay, Southampton Football Club, Lucite, Gravatom.

On the face of it, it’s not a list likely to make the heart beat faster.

But maybe it should.

This disparate group of companies, some of which are today just footnotes in history, are all united by one thing.

That’s right, they are all Hampshire firms or companies with significant operations here that have recently fallen to foreign takeovers.

And it’s far from comprehensive. Many, many more, big and small, have succumbed to a fat pile of dollars or euros in just the last few years.

And now, this month, another name looks certain to be added to that sombre group – Chloride.

It is headquartered down here and although not widely known is a highly regarded company with a long history in Northam.

As you can see opposite, a shock bid from Switzerland all but guarantees its future owners now lie overseas, although time will tell whether that’s in Missouri or Zurich.

Chloride is a fantastic outfit, as demonstrated by the sky-high sums on offer for it. Top quality technology, well run, great clients and the world at its feet (albeit the arcane and impenetrable world of uninterruptible power supplies).

And that’s the problem.

Raymarine aside, they don’t come for the weak and the struggling.

They come for our best and the strongest. Those most likely to grow, with the stellar earning potential and the world class intellectual property. And it is happening all the time.

If it were a two-way street, then it would be hard to object, but it’s not.

Apart from a valiant contribution from the likes of Chemring and BAE Systems, it’s pretty much all one-way traffic.

You might be sitting there thinking ‘so what’?

But it seems to me a simple fact that an Arab in Dubai has a different set of priorities to a docker from St Denys. And yet it is this same Middle Eastern gent whose views are today what really matter on the future direction of Southampton’s container terminal, or Dubai Ports World Southampton, as they now insist it be called.

American bankers, Canadian dentists and Singaporean public servants now pull the strings at Southampton docks. The latter lot also own half of the city’s biggest shopping centre. The views of Spanish construction magnates are what really matter over at the airport. German industrialists now own and direct the laser technology developed in Hampshire and it is the black, red and gold of Deutschland that flutters uber alles the stern of the much loved yacht brand that was born on the Hamble.

On the one hand it’s a cause of celebration that foreign firms want to back our talent with their money and yet it’s starting to feel like it’s going too far.

This is no xenophobic rant, more a call to question whether this can simply be allowed to go on indefinitely.

From chocolate to cars to nuclear power we have watched our brightest and best consumed by predators from across the water gorging as though we were some sort of giant corporate buffet.

How long can we keep on selling the family silver?