BTR comes back from the grave

N Collins
12 Jun 2008

It's the greatest comeback since Neil Diamond. The old rocker tops the US album charts, and a company called Invensys returns to the FTSE 100 index.

Invensys has nothing to do with commodities, it's not some middle-European miner pretending to be British, and it's not some marketing man's newly-created business name.

Three years ago it was reporting pre-tax losses of £473 million on sales of £2.5 billion, following a debt and equity rescue package in 2004.

The rise, near-collapse and comeback of this strange company begins in 1967, when a clever young accountant called Owen Green became boss of BTR. In those days accounting was, well, more flexible.

Takeovers, cost-cutting and asset-stripping propelled BTR into the top 10 of the FTSE.

When Green stepped down in 1993, the empire had hundreds of subsidiaries, held together by the Herculean efforts of the finance department, but BTR's small business units couldn't cope with the tsunami of globalisation.

The stock slid down the FTSE 100 league table and merged with another constituent, controls group Siebe, itself a product of a driven entrepreneur, Barrie Stephens.

The decline continued. It looked like SieBTR and Die, and in 2003 the company, burdened with £3.3 billion of debt and its meaningless new name, fell out of the index. Today's Invensys has nothing of BTR and little of Siebe left.

It's about to be reclassified into the "software sub-division of the software technology centre", which sounds like a black box of mysteries out of which profits may emerge. Rather like the old BTR, in fact; some things don't change, after all, as Neil Diamond might sing.