Macduff Shellfish Group (“Macduff”), one of Europe’s leading wild caught shellfish processors, has entered into an agreement for 100% of the assets of Macduff to be acquired by Canadian-based Clearwater Seafoods (“Clearwater”) for £98.4m from the Beaton family and Change Capital Partners, the specialist pan-European private equity fund.

Based in Mintlaw, near Peterhead in Scotland, Macduff has factories in Mintlaw, Stornoway and Exeter and owns and operates 14 mid-shore scallop harvesting vessels from its Dumfries facility.  It employs approximately 400 people at the seasonal peak, specialising in scallops, langoustine, whelk and crab.

Nova Scotia-based Clearwater is one of North America’s largest vertically integrated seafood companies, employing approximately 1,400 people, delivering premium wild seafood including scallops, lobster, clams, coldwater shrimp, crab and groundfish.

The deal brings Macduff access to new markets, investment and opportunities for growth.  For Clearwater, the acquisition of Macduff provides access to market leading supply in key markets and channels along with a well-established brand, UK-based harvesting and processing expertise, a strong management team and a talented workforce.

Under the deal Macduff will retain its name and operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Clearwater, sharing resources and best practice between the businesses. Current Chairman Euan Beaton will become President of Macduff and Managing Director Roy Cunningham, will assume the role of Vice President.

Euan Beaton, Chairman of Macduff Shellfish, said: “Having reached our goal of building a £52m business, we had one suitor in mind which shares our vision and values to enable us to accelerate our growth on a global scale.  With a similar vertically integrated business model, sustainability at its heart, sound employee practices and strong relationships with fishermen but operating on a much bigger scale, Clearwater is an ideal fit for Macduff.

“This deal is great news for our operations in the UK, bringing investment and access to new markets within an extremely successful and respected business.  It provides learning and development opportunities for our staff as we share best practice with Clearwater and it gives fishermen access to more markets.”

Ian Smith, CEO of Clearwater said, “The acquisition of Macduff brings together two of the world’s leading and fastest growing vertically integrated wild shellfish harvesters. The transaction will allow Clearwater to integrate its vessel management and sustainable harvesting practices, innovative processing technologies along with its global sales, marketing and distribution footprint into Macduff; a company that already possesses a talented management team, excellent resource assets and a strong presence in Europe, the world’s largest and most valuable seafood market.  Our companies have been building a working relationship for more than three years and we are confident Macduff represents a highly attractive investment with a strong strategic fit for Clearwater.”

Steven Petrow, Partner at Change Capital Partners, said: “When we invested in Macduff in 2011 there was a compelling opportunity to transform the business through international expansion and strategic acquisitions. Thanks to our highly successful partnership with the Beaton family and Management we have delivered on all fronts and are incredibly proud of Macduff’s achievements.  This has been a very successful investment and we are convinced that the next chapter in the company’s history will be very exciting.”

Macduff was advised by Burness Paul, KPMG and Anderson Anderson & Brown.

It may seem an exaggeration to describe British supermarket chain Tesco as ‘struggling’ as they announce underlying profits of £354m for the first half of the financial year, but considering that figure was £779m for the same period in 2014, the firm has seen a 55% decrease in profitability.

The pre-tax profit figure tells a healthier story at £74m, compared with a £19m loss for the same period in 2014. Meanwhile like-for-like sales have dropped 1.1% in the UK, but overall sales volume has risen 1.4% and the total number of transactions at Tesco in the first half of its financial year are also up 1.5%.

So what does all this really mean? The answer is somewhat complex, but the Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis who arrived from Unilever just over a year ago is rebuilding the company after they announced the worst results in their history in April. Those results showed a record pre-tax loss for the financial year to the end of February of £6.4bn.

Lewis has adopted a strategy of putting pressure on profits in the short term by introducing widespread price cuts and increasing the number of staff on the shop floor, to attempt to attract customers back.

Tesco have sold their South Korean Homeplus stores and reduced their overall debt by £4.2 billion in the process, but they have also confirmed that to meet the UK government’s potential National Living Wage of £9 an hour for workers by 2020 it will cost them about £500m.

Interviewed about the latest set of results by the BBC, Mr Lewis commented, “If I compare it to the second half of last year, the first half of this year feels like we’ve made some progress. We obviously had some issues to deal with, we dealt with them. It meant that in the second half of last year we made no profit whatsoever in the UK.”

“Our sales are growing compared to where they were either a year ago, or indeed in the second half of last year and we’ve generated some profit as we rebuild the profitability of Tesco business.”

Tesco’s announcement of poor results come shortly after competitor Sainsbury’s predicted rosier than anticipated full year profits.

The UK supermarket scene is an ultra competitive landscape. In relative terms sales are still dominated by the big four supermarkets Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, who had a combined market share of 73.2% of the UK grocery sector in the quarter ending 4th January 2015.

That is a small decrease from 74.1% in 2007, but the ‘big four’ are coming under increasing pressure from discount retailers such as Aldi and Lidl.

Tesco plan to strike back with additional price cuts, after this week’s announcement of their underlying profits essentially dropping by more than half in the first six months of the financial year.

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American IT giant Hewlett-Packard has announced plans for significant job cuts, as it prepares to restructure over the coming months. HP is also set to be divided into two separate companies before the end of 2015.

The company’s chief executive Meg Whitman addressed the press this week, with figures revealing that HP is planning to reduce its workforce by 25,000 to 30,000, adding to the 54,000 jobs that have been cut in the last three years as the firm pushes to streamline its operations.

The proposed job losses would mean HP will have shed 100,000 employees in a decade, a notable figure given that the entire firm’s workforce is estimated to be around 300,000 in total. The number of job losses are reminiscent of the big telecoms and IT boom and bust cycles of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Many of HP’s staff reductions will come from their corporate hardware and services operations, which is to be rebranded as Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) later this year. The new company will operate separately from HP Inc, which is focused on the printer and PC marketplace.

Plummeting sales of PCs are perhaps what has hit HP hardest over recent years. Meanwhile, competitors have made massive gains in the mobile and tablet markets, while Apple’s tech market share has skyrocketed over the past five years.

HPs streamlining and split will be undertaken with the aim of putting its new HPE enterprise business in a more advantageous position as an independent entity.

Whitman and her fellow management executive team at the Silicon Valley firm have been fighting hard over recent years to turn the company’s fortunes around. A large percentage of its services workforce has already been moved to lower cost offshore facilities.

On the restructuring and changes of direction that have already taken place, in addition to the latest plans, Whitman insisted this week, “This has been a bit of a moving target. It has been a bumpy road, no doubt about it. We are conscious there have been a number of restructuring plans for this business. While we need more restructuring, I have the highest confidence I’ve had in four years that we will get there.”

Whitman will lead HPE after the split and has also warned analysts to expect modest growth rates for the company, more closely aligned with global GDP than the booming tech enterprise market. Meanwhile, in the quarter which ended on 31st July HP revenue from the PC and printer side of its business – its biggest concern – fell by over 11%.

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