Andrew Hill Investors start to say how much pay is too much

May 30, 2012 1:48 pm by Andrew Hill

As head of the world’s largest advertising group by revenues, WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell is used to talking about image. His own, which he assiduously promotes through the media, is about to take a battering.

Sorrell - "totally aligned"

ISS, the shareholder advisory firm, has recommended investors at its June 13 annual meeting should vote against WPP’s pay policies, according to which the chief executive will receive total pay and bonuses of £6.8m, up 60 per cent on the previous year.

Nothing new here, you might think. Investors holding more than a third of the stock voted against the remuneration report last year. Sir Martin, one of the longest-serving chief executives of a FTSE 100 company, shrugged that off and probably will again this time. Speaking before the ISS recommendation, he told the UK’s Sunday Times that his interests were “totally aligned with shareholders’. I am a big shareholder – 85 per cent of the package is performance related”. While his base salary had increased from £1m to £1.3m, he pointed out he had had “only one increase in 10 years”.

Continue reading: “Investors start to say how much pay is too much”

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Posted in Advertising, Business, Management |
From FT.com May 28, 2012

Now we know what people mean when they say merger integration is torture. Former staff at Autonomy, the UK software company bought by Hewlett-Packard less than a year ago, say submitting to the US company’s “stifling” bureaucratic procedures felt “like being water-boarded”.

Posted in Management |

Andrew Hill Unilever’s soap operas: history repeats itself

May 28, 2012 4:41 pm by Andrew Hill

The return of the “soap opera” with a digital twist – thanks to multi-million pound deals struck by Unilever with Viacom and News Corp – is a further indication that there really is nothing new in marketing.

As I wrote recently, in relation to the spat between BrewDog, a Scottish independent brewer, and the beverage giant Diageo, the tools of communication and promotion may change, but the underlying challenges and responses are the same as they ever were.

Last time I talked to Keith Weed, Unilever’s irrepressible chief marketing officer (and the man behind the “new” soap operas), he took me to task for suggesting that William Hesketh Lever, the industrialist who founded Unilever’s ancestor Lever Brothers, might have been amazed by some of the group’s modern marketing techniques.

Not at all, said Mr Weed. In fact,  Lever (later Lord Leverhulme) was always on the lookout for different ways to promote his soap and cleaning products. For instance, he brought back two projectors from a Paris exhibition that he used to beam product advertisements onto the side of London buildings, causing such a fuss that, according to Unilever’s CMO, “they had to make it illegal, to prevent traffic grinding to a halt”. The modern equivalent would be Unilever’s “Angels” ad campaign for Lynx deodorant, which appeared to show angels dropping from heaven to interact with astonished passengers at London’s Victoria station.

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Posted in Advertising, Consumer Goods |

Andrew Hill With SAP deal, Ariba’s 13-year headstart pays off

May 23, 2012 2:14 pm by Andrew Hill

Investors with long-ish memories will recall that Ariba, the business-to-business ecommerce network that SAP has just agreed to buy, was a dotcom IPO star of 1999: its stock surged 291 per cent on its debut, giving it a market capitalisation of $3.7bn – only just short of the $4.3bn that the German enterprise software company has agreed to pay for it 13 years later. Those were the days, Facebook investors may ruefully reflect.

Ariba had much further to go in the short period before the dotcom bubble deflated in 2000 – at one point it was worth a heady $30bn. But its longevity, before finally being snapped up by one of the companies it successfully challenged, demonstrates the durability of its underlying offering. Ariba’s early potential was obviously hugely overrated at the peak of the internet boom, but it grew into that original valuation.

Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) is quite the thing, with companies like Salesforce.com and Netsuite angling to provide solutions that simplify customer and supplier relations and allow enterprises, large and small, to concentrate on their core business. At a Netsuite customer conference I attended in San Francisco last week, SAP was one of the competitors that Netsuite claimed was lagging behind. By buying its way into the cloud, the German company has made a bid to close the gap that Ariba and other web-based B2B companies started to open up 13 years ago.

 

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Posted in Business, Technology |
From FT.com May 21, 2012

Dustin Moskovitz, an early employee of Facebook, is worth $5bn, give or take the odd million, after last week’s initial public offering. He could now apply his technological knowhow and abundant new wealth to solving the world’s loftiest organisational problems. Instead, he and his partners are hunkered down in a dark ground-floor office in San Francisco’s Mission district working out how to liberate office workers and middle managers from the tyranny of lengthening to-do lists, overflowing email and meetings about meetings. Dilbert, meet Dustin.

Posted in Business, Management, Media, Technology |

John Gapper A small crowd for Rajat Gupta’s big trial

May 21, 2012 11:43 pm by John Gapper

Monday was only the opening day of the trial of Rajat Gupta, the former head of McKinsey and board member of Goldman Sachs, on charges of conspiracy and insider trading. But one thing is already clear: he is not a crowd-pleaser.

Compared with some other recent trials of Wall Street figures, such as Bernie Madoff and Raj Rajaratnam, the turnout was modest. The man that Reed Brodsky, the prosecutor, described as “the ultimate corporate insider” was mainly surrounded by friends and family.

Judge Jed Rakoff’s courtroom on the 14th floor of the court building filled up sufficiently to require some of the press and lawyers to decamp to an 11th floor overflow room (in which the sound quality was abysmal).

In general, however, it felt like a private affair in relation to other landmark Wall Street cases. Given the status of Mr Gupta –  the most senior figure from the US corporate establishment to face charges since the 2008 crisis – that is odd.

Continue reading: “A small crowd for Rajat Gupta’s big trial”

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Posted in Business, Finance |

Andrew Hill Why Waterstones is undaunted by Amazon

May 21, 2012 5:25 pm by Andrew Hill

There were some interesting foretastes of Monday’s deal between Amazon and the big UK bookstore chain Waterstones in comments made by the latter’s managing director, James Daunt, at the FT a few weeks ago.

Mr Daunt – who had previously called the etailer a “ruthless, moneymaking devil” – spoke at a roundtable in early May to launch the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. You can listen to a podcast of his initial interview in which he pointed out that all bookshops had to find ways to make the environment for book-buying attractive again. He added:

The largest of us face the additional challenge of how do we become a relevant part of this new digital world, in which, clearly, a substantial part of the reading that our customers engage in is going to take place.

 

Continue reading: “Why Waterstones is undaunted by Amazon”

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Posted in Business, Media, Retail, Technology |

John Gapper Facebook’s banks have to do some underwriting

May 21, 2012 2:06 pm by John Gapper

The 33 banks that signed up for the Facebook initial public offering may have thought they were heavily discounting their normal six or seven per cent underwriting fee in return for some good publicity on a sure-fire winner. It doesn’t look like that now.

Facebook’s sputtering IPO is drawing scrutiny both to the role of Nasdaq, which has admitted to “embarrassing” mistakes  on Friday, but to the price stabilisation tactics that the banks, led by Morgan Stanley, had to employ.

Continue reading: “Facebook’s banks have to do some underwriting”

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Posted in Business, Technology |
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John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT. He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.

Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.

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