Hanson plc
 |
|
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Minerals |
| Founded | 1964 as Hanson Trust Ltd |
| Headquarters | London, England, UK |
|
Key people
|
Daniel Cooper (CEO) |
| Products | Building materials |
| Revenue | £4,133m (2006) |
| £563m (2006) | |
| £401m (2006) | |
| Owner | Heidelberg Cement |
|
Number of employees
|
25,400 (2006) |
| Website | Official website |
Hanson plc (formerly Hanson Trust plc) is a British-based international building materials company, headquartered in Maidenhead. Traded on the and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index for many years, the company was acquired by a division of German rival HeidelbergCement in August 2007.
Hanson was built up by James Hanson, later Lord Hanson, and Gordon White, later Baron White of Hull, who set up Hanson Trust in 1964.
Their policy was to purchase underperforming assets and make them a source of profit. Hanson and White were willing to take a wide range of measures to do so, including mass redundancies, and therefore attracted opposition and accusations that they were "asset strippers", but from 1979 the company was successful from the shareholders' point of view and respected during the early 1980s, with Hanson (who gave millions of pounds to the Conservatives) admired by Margaret Thatcher.
One of the most notable takeovers, at least to the general public, was the acquisition in 1983 of the United Drapery Stores, or UDS, group, which owned many of Britain's most well-known high street clothes shops and department stores, including John Collier, Richard Shops and the chain of Allders department stores. To fund this purchase Hanson broke up UDS and sold John Collier to a management buy-out team, and Richard Shops to Habitat, keeping only the core department store business.
In 1986 Hanson bought SCM, an American chemicals to typewriters business. This included the paper division that was formerly the Allied Paper Corporation. Hanson sold most of the SCM business units and the headquarters building in New York City for a significant profit.
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Wikipedia