Serco sells Ghan, Indian Pacific operations

[Agent_c]

Not exactly unexpected but... http://www.canberratimes.com.au/bus...southern-rail-from-serco-20150330-1mb0rk.html

Private equity firm Allegro Funds has acquired the company behind luxury train services The Ghan and The Indian Pacific trains from British giant Serco, and is aiming to capitalise on the falling Australian dollar to help improve growth in passenger numbers for luxury travellers.

Serco is listed on the London Stock Exchange and since 1999 has owned the passenger and rail group Great Southern Rail, which also operates The Overland passenger service between Adelaide and Melbourne. Serco has a market capitalisation of £930 million ($1.7 billion) and its Asian-Pacific division operates the rail services.

Allegro founding partner and managing director Adrian Loader said there were already strong opportunities in luxury end travel and this has been further boosted by the drop in the Australian dollar, which gives overseas tourists better spending power and makes domestic travel more appealing to Australians compared with the cost of overseas travel.

"I think it's a winner," he said. "It works both ways".

Guess that's going to limit their ability to synergise on the Caledonian sleeper...

 

[DownSouth]

Guess that's going to limit their ability to synergise on the Caledonian sleeper...

My source at GSR says that no GSR staff have left to go to the UK, so there was unlikely to be much synergy except in the fertile minds of enthusiasts even if GSR did stay under the ownership of Serco.

GSR was sold for the fire sale price of just A$4.8 million - clearly things are going worse for the Serco Group than was originally thought.

It's bad news for GSR because Serco Asia-Pacific were good owners who invested in the company with some good rolling stock refurbishments and excellent advertising campaigns. Allegro Funds is basically just a hedge fund which will gut the company to get it showing a paper profit and then sell it on.

 

[LesS]

Sadly I agree with DownSouth. The interest of the hedge fund would seem to be premised on the "sum of the parts" is greater then the cost of "the whole".

This kind of exercise has been done before and could happen again.

I would not be surprised if the present standards of the services becomes increasingly rundown.

It is all very sad.