My previous article, RIP an old friend had at least one reader worrying about Robert Sutherland Smith given that he started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at BAT Industries. His introduction is a cracking one.
Belonging to a generation of children who smoked Turf cigarettes on London bombed sites to collect the cards of famous film stars and whose culturally formative involvement with cigarettes was through the allure of films like the Maltese Falcon I start this review to camera – as they say. I gazed at the results from the British American Tobacco Company for the year to 31 December 2012 and groaned. I flung my Humphrey Bogart fedora – slightly battered – onto the hook on the wall and stared again; sales revenue down 1.4%? I groaned again and took a Lucky Strike (brand sales up 11%) from the pack in the top pocket of my shirt and lit up. Below that top line sales figure, things had suddenly got a whole lot better; operating profit up 20%; net income up 24%. But were they legit? They were after all only the ‘statutory’ figures demanded by Federal busy bodies and others. As if by some kind of slow motion Hollywood magic, through a haze of imaginary Lucky Strike tobacco smoke, the truer adjusted figures emerged dream like – as they might in an old black and white movie.
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