Secondary Recommendation

Creston - Marketing Services firm experiencing recovery in demand

June 2010

Investing in shares may lose you all or some of your money. Past performance is no indication of future performance. Some of the shares recommended here may be small company shares, which can be relatively illiquid and hard to trade and this makes such shares more risky than other investments.

The first time we met with Don Elgie, chief executive of marketing services group, Creston, he had just completed the first of a string of acquisitions as part of a â€œbuy and buildâ€ strategy to turn it into a leading force in the industry. At that time, in 2001, the marketing sector had been laid low by the bursting of the dot-com bubble and for someone like Elgie, a former European operations director at Saatchi & Saatchi, doors were always likely to open. In the event Elgie, who we again met up with last month, went on to make a further nine deals and turnover ballooned from Â£9.8m in 2002 to nearly Â£84m last year, while pretax profit soared from Â£0.2m to Â£14.2m. However, the elephant in the room was always the debt and ...

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With small companies there is an above average degree of risk compared to buying blue chips. Please be aware that we have not assessed the suitability of any of these investments for you. The newsletter simply states a personal view and diarises the editor’s investment decisions. Please speak to your stockbroker or other qualified individual to ascertain whether any of these companies mentioned would form useful additions to your own portfolios. Past performance is no indication of future success.

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