The departure of Alison Cooper from Imperial Brands is a blow for campaigners who want more women in charge of FTSE 100 companies.
Her exit will leave the number of FTSE 100 women at five, when Alison Rose is promoted at Royal Bank of Scotland next month.
Those campaigners could reflect that Cooper had a more than decent run. She got away with a fair amount of failure, just like any male executive might.
Over her nine-year tenure, the shares are virtually flat. They had a good spell at first but have gone down in flames over the past two years, hence her departure.
During that period she has been paid about £30 million. The City has become blasé about such figures, but we shouldn’t forget what a staggering amount of money that is. The average salary at Imperial Brands is £36,000.
Cooper, a likeable sort, didn’t invent Imps. It has been around since 1901. She’s a manager, not an entrepreneur.
She did face a revolt on her pay from shareholders. When the going was good two years ago, they blocked a plan to move her annual rewards from £5.5 million to a potential £8.5 million. It is nearly always a sign of greed when very-well-paid fund managers think the CEO is trying it on.
On the face of it, Imps should be a simple business: make addictive products that are dreadful for public health; search the globe for new customers to replace the old, dead, ones.
In truth it’s a bit trickier than that, as Cooper has lately found.
The switch to vaping products seemed obvious, indeed inevitable, but it’s a new business and predicting how it will grow, where, and how much to invest has proved tricky.
It appears that Cooper — nominally a cigar smoker, if we assume that’s not a stunt — is better at the old products than the new ones.
Getting rid of the chief executive when you are still searching for a chairman might seem like an odd move, but it is a sign perhaps of the level of shareholder frustration at recent performance. Imps plans to unveil a chairman soon, who will at least arrive with the process of finding a CEO under way.
Who it picks will give a clear signal of whether it thinks it can really make a future of vaping, or if it has decided the easier path is to rely on ciggies and
roll-ups and forget new-fangled technology.
Reasons to be cheerful about the chances of recession
Here’s a bold prediction: we will avoid a recession. For now. I’m going to sound like one of those annoying economists who can’t come to a conclusion about anything (on the one hand this, on the other… ) but sometimes that’s hard to avoid.
The eco figures this week have been overwhelmingly poor. The manufacturing and construction sectors are plainly already in recession. But they aren’t hugely significant to the overall economy, unless you happen to work in them, of course.
Today’s figures from the services sector are also bad. Particularly worrying is the suggestion that jobs growth is tumbling.
There’s more than a slight feeling that businesses that have been defying gravity in Wile E Coyote style have just made the mistake of looking down and have suddenly realised that they are running on thin air.
Words from the latest CIPS report include “ominous”, “hard-pressed”, “exhausted” and “dire”.
The Bank of England is surely going to have to cut rates soon.
But being optimistic: consumer spending has so far held up. Unemployment remains low. Throw in some Brexit stockpiling, and that should be enough to mean the third quarter doesn’t follow the second down the pan.
After that, well, if there’s a no-deal Brexit, a general election and further chaos from the Orange Child in charge of America, we are plainly heading for trouble.
