It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch, but there has been a degree of sniggering about the profit warning from NCC Group. In 2009 the company, “after an extensive procurement process”, chose a technology supplier to design and install a computer platform to be used across the group which would be good enough to allow future growth.
It was sold a pup. The company admitted yesterday that since going live, the new system had “caused significant disruption across the whole group” despite “comprehensive” — read “desperate” — efforts to get the thing to work. The board has decided to fall back on the previous IT system while working out what to do, and has written off the £6.9 million cost of the new one.
The shares lost 5 per cent, although the problems had been signalled beforehand. It has not been missed by market wags that NCC is an IT company that offers cyber-security to corporates, and that one of its divisions provides insurance against, er, software failure.
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• TUI Travel, the travel company that thanks the Lord it isn’t Thomas Cook, appointed a new non-executive the other day, Janis Kong. Someone long on time has been combing the TUI website and has discovered that most of the non-execs have a reasonable biography there — with one exception. The entry for Coline McConville fails to mention her ten years at HBOS as a non-exec, including service on the remuneration and international risk control committees. Mind you, Kong herself did time on the Royal Bank of Scotland remuneration committee and signed off on Fred Goodwin’s £20 million pension pot.
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• David Jones, the chief executive of Havas, the French advertising agency, has been launching his book Who Cares Wins. The latest signing was in Beijing. The book is all about corporate governance, and how responsible companies will perform best. In China?
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Michael Turner, chairman of the brewer Fuller, Smith & Turner, has been working to find a comparison in this Diamond Jubilee year with 1952. He says that the company has raised dividends since then by 14,000 per cent. This outstrips the 9,000 per cent profit you would have made had you bought Buckingham Palace then. Can any other company match this?
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In the blue corner Peter Rothwell
Peter Rothwell, the chief executive of Kuoni, is an unusual chap, and not only because he is a Brit running a Swiss company. He flies planes (once closing Luton airport when his light aircraft blew a tyre on landing in a crosswind), climbs mountains so he can ski off piste, and flies helicopters.
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He must have nerves of steel. “Actually, I’m scared of heights,” he says. “But it’s improving. When you are up a mountain in a helicopter, you sometimes have to land on the edge of an abyss, so it helps if you can keep a level head.” Yes, I can see it might.