Tweed Joins The Suits On Board Of Struggling Stokes
The Sunday Age
Sunday December 9, 2007
DAVID TWEED, the man comfortable buying shares from elderly folk at a steep discount to prevailing market prices, has got himself a board seat at a very out-of-the-way company.
The company that now enjoys his talents is the listed Stokes (Australasia) group, which distributes appliance spare parts, badges and medallions and electrical switches.Interests associated with Tweed have been buying shares in Stokes for some time and at last count they were up to nearly 25% of the capital.This is one instance when Tweed hasn't been buying shares on the cheap. In fact, he's been paying 60 cents a share, historically quite a high price for Stokes scrip. Stokes has had a hard time of it in recent years, alternating between profits and losses. In the June year just completed, it lost $239,860 on sales of about $20 million.Tweed likes the company so much that just the other day he stood for election to the Stokes board and, with 30 shareholders in attendance, was elected on a show of hands.Wonders will never cease. A clutch of other people also were elected as directors, Ian Alexander and David Welsh, while John Hackett was re-elected as a director.They joined existing board members William Stokes who is the chairman, and preference share king, Gordon Bradley Elkington.Asked to comment on the makeup of the board, Elkington said that most of the directors now had decent stakes in the company."It's a bit of an unusual company now because the people on the board who are not associated with one another have reasonably significant holdings. I think that gives an incentive to try and get things right," he said."I think it's a good board. Everybody's got a big stake in it. We've been getting along quite well."And how did he find Tweed and what exactly did he bring to the party? "OK, OK, quite good really. (He's got) pretty good analytical skills." He added that Tweed was "quite committed" and "quite enthusiastic".Commenting on Stokes generally, he said, "It's a difficult industry to be in. It's hard work in manufacturing. We're doing our best."Morris a sellerCHRISTOPHER MORRIS, the man behind Computershare, has sold some scrip in the share registry keeper. That's unusual. He's usually a keen supporter of the stock. Just the other day he disposed of 81,021 shares at $10.34 apiece. The last time he was spotted in the market was in August when he picked up 100,000 shares at $8.87 each. Morris, who switched from chief executive to executive chairman in November last year, is still sitting on a useful parcel of shares: 55.6 million worth $567 million.Patersons soars PATERSONS Securities has produced a soaraway result in the latest year, increasing earn-ings by 83% on revenue that passed $100 million for the first time.Pre-tax earnings advanced from $7.5 million to $13.6 mil-lion on revenue that went from $76.6 million to $102.3 million.Shareholders, including such folk as executive chairman Michael Manford, Aaron Constantine, Murray McGill and Philip Schofield, collected dividends of $6 million during the June year, and a further $6.4 million was paid in September."This record turnover and profit was achieved as a result of increased business activity and our quality people lever-aging the Patersons national infrastructure," said Manford."These results are in line with Patersons' long-term growth strategy illustrated by the firm's consistent revenue growth, which has averaged 35.5% over the past eight years," he chortled.During the year, the corp-orate finance department raised about $1 billion from 100 new issues for mid-cap com-panies. The institutional brok-ing desk posted record revenue and profits and, according to Manford, continued to increase penetration of local and off-shore institutions dealing in Australian equities.CHESS holdings increased from $3.6 billion to $4.6 billion.Meanwhile, money, other than dividends, flowing the way of the firm's heavies was up from $9.3 million to $13.9 million.
© 2007 The Sunday Age