You can’t say we weren’t warned. Lord Digby Jones, a former director-general of the CBI, has long cautioned that “if we don’t watch out, China will eat our lunch”. On Thursday, it got started, with breakfast. A state-owned Chinese company is gobbling up a majority stake in Weetabix for £720m.
“I have been waking people up for years to the fact that China and India wanted our lunch, but I never thought they would want our breakfast as well,” Jones, who is now a UK trade ambassador, said.
Weetabix, made in Northamptonshire and exported to more than 80 countries, is the nation’s favourite breakfast product – we get through 3.4m biscuits a day.
Weetabix, which also makes Alpen and Ready brek, left British control nine years ago when Sir Richard George, whose family had run it since before the second world war, sold the family firm to the flamboyant venture capitalist Lyndon Lea for £642m. Lea, the 41-year-old son of a Lancashire hairdresser and engineer who is known for hosting parties featuring Cirque de Soleil dancers and sushi served off the bodies of near-naked women at his Californian beach house, was blasé about the fivefold return his private equity firm made on the deal. “It’s been a good return for us,” he said.
Lea’s Lion Capital firm will retain a 40% stake in the company. Bright Foods has committed itself to safeguarding production at the Weetabix factories in Burton Latimer and Corby, Northamptonshire, where 2,000 workers are employed.
The deal came on the same day as a Chinese retailer sealed the acquisition of Gieves & Hawkes from a Hong Kong company, which bought the Savile Row tailor from its British shareholders in 2002 for about £10m.