It is a company that dates back to Britain’s industrial revolution: an ironworks in south Wales that started in 1759 and supplied the tracks for Brunel’s Great Western Railway. It has become, as GKN, a global engineering giant supplying car and aerospace parts, employing 60,000 around the world and 6,000 in the UK. But now corporate raiders loom in the form of a controversial £7.8bn hostile bid – in which Theresa May’s government has been sidelined, despite its aspiration to develop a new UK industrial strategy.
Bidder Melrose has set a deadline of 1pm on Thursday for GKN shareholders to accept or reject its largely paper-based bid. Insiders describe the situation as finely balanced. Melrose, which is about the fifth of the size, says GKN has lost its way, repeatedly missing profit targets; it says its approach of buying underperforming businesses, restructuring them and selling them on in three to five years will generate far more value. As of Friday, just under 10% of GKN shareholders were backing the Melrose bid, broadly in line with the 9% support for the GKN board.
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