Pub estates in huge shake up
The coming months will see one of the biggest pub shake-ups since the beer orders, with more than 10,000 managed and tenanted houses set to change hands.
The first tremor in the sequence of corporate shockwaves began this week when Spirit Group emerged as the winner in the race to buy Scottish & Newcastle (S&N) Retail, for a massive £2.51bn.
Spirit, led by chief executive Karen Jones, is still putting the finishing touches on the deal but has exchanged contracts with S&N.
The move will add 1,450 pubs to Spirit's current estate of 1,100, to leapfrog Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) as the biggest managed pub business in the UK.
The hotly-contested auction saw Spirit triumph over a raft of other bidders including Laurel Pub Company, M&B, Pubmaster and pub entrepreneur Trevor Hemmings.
It will now add S&N brands such as Chef & Brewer and John Barras to its own portfolio, which includes Two For One and Tom Cobleigh.
Meanwhile, speculation is rife that tenanted giant Punch is in talks to buy the 3,200-strong Pubmaster group for about £1.2bn.
Pubmaster is rumoured to have granted Punch a two-week negotiating period.
Both companies were remaining tight-lipped, although Punch boss Giles Thorley did try to play down merger talk. He told The Publican Newspaper: "People know we are raising money to buy pubs and are linking us with everything.
"We will look at everything in the market and if we become aware that Pubmaster is for sale we would be very interested."
Elsewhere, as revealed exclusively on thePublican.com last month, relative minnow County Estate Management is set to acquire InnSpired, the 1,100-strong pub company, in a deal worth more than £350m.
On top of that Enterprise Inns is set to buy Unique Pub Company next spring to add 4,000 pubs to its 5,000-strong estate.
The deal was set up last year when Enterprise formed a consortium to buy the pubs from Japanese bank Nomura.
The tenanted pub company, headed by Ted Tuppen, is set to push the merger button in March 2004.
These deals combined bring the grand total of pubs changing hands to 9,750 - almost one in six UK pubs. After all this, Spirit Group is likely to sell on about 300 managed pubs from the S&N Retail estate as well as perhaps 200 from its own bottom-end.
Spirit is backed by Texas Pacific, which is also a key shareholder of Punch. This makes the tenanted giant favourite to secure any pubs sold to a lease operator.
