Companies are funded by investors with their hard-earned cash and are expected to invest it wisely to provide a better return than those investors would get elsewhere. Any cash handed back, then, by whatever means should be looked at very carefully.
Hansteen’s return of £580 million to investors, pretty much half its market capitalisation, looks unavoidable. This year the industrial property company was in receipt of an offer from Blackstone and another investor for its German and Dutch properties that was far too good to ignore.
The price settled on, €1.28 billion, was 6 per cent more than those properties had been in the books for at the end of last year. It was completed, conveniently, just before the end of Hansteen’s first half.
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