Philip Bowman, the chief executive of Smiths Group, will stand down at the end of this year after eight years in the job. For much of that time there has been persistent background chatter that someone will come in and unbundle the FTSE 100 engineer’s five separate profits centres, or that the board should be doing it for themselves on behalf of investors.
The conglomerate model is out of favour, but the only real attraction of a break-up is that it would make each component part, many of which are appealing to predators, easier to bid for.
A recurring feature of Smiths’ figures is that as one part is moving in one direction, others are going in another. A feature of the full-year figures