>

There are usually two main reasons as to why a business is put up for sale: 1) The owners wish to cash in and make a tidy profit or 2) It is costing them more to keep the business going so they need to offload it. Which of those two do you think is the most likely. I’d like to say I think the first, but with the way the industry had suffered over the last few years, that seems highly unlikely.

So lets pick apart the second reason. Two years ago Anglian was snapped up by it’s lenders after they failed to meet their financial obligations. When lenders take on a business they lent to, one of their main targets is to re-finance and see if they can get the business back on the right tracks. If they manage to do that, the lenders quite often keep hold of the business for a while to see if they can make any further profit out of it. But as I’ve already said, this seems unlikely right now. After such a short stint of ownership, the lenders have put Anglian back up for sale. The reason? We don’t know as of yet, but I speculate that the lenders were faced with such a large task that it wasn’t worth putting any more of their resources into the recovery plan, so will have tied any loose ends and have now put Anglian in the market place. 

The big question is who will buy Anglian? Will private equity firms be interested or will a trouble recent financial history put them off? My opinion is that Anglian needs a competitor to take it over. It needs another company within the same industry who can successfully run it. I don’t think private equity firms will show enough dedication to make a success of it.

There will be some out there, mostly competitors and the odd disgruntled customer who wouldn’t mind in the slightest bit if Anglian didn’t get bought and was allowed to just drift off into the distance and eventually disappear. From a business point of view, one less national would do us smaller installer businesses some good. But from a personal point of view, we have to remember there are thousands of people associated with Anglian who rely on them to make a living. More redundancies is would be the worst outcome