Ted Tuppen

06 May 2005
Ted Tuppen

Overall ranking: 7

Pub ranking: 1

Snapshot

Ted Tuppen is the chief executive of Enterprise Inns, the UK's largest pub operator. The group, which Tuppen was instrumental in creating in 1991, started in 2005 with 8,727 leased and tenanted pubs valued at £4.9b.

Career guide

Tuppen, who was born in 1952, started his career as a chartered accountant. He worked with KPMG in London, North America and Europe before becoming the managing director of a privately-owned international engineering company between 1980 and 1989. He also acted as a consultant to a variety of businesses.

He moved into the pub sector in 1991 when he led the management buy-in of 372 pubs from Bass that marked the birth of Enterprise Inns.

What we think

Tuppen has pursued an aggressive acquisition policy that has built Enterprise Inns into the profitable giant it is today, with a market capitalisation of £1.99b.

The group owned fewer than 500 pubs when it floated on the Stock Market in 1995. It ended the nineties with 2,430 sites, boosted by a 1999 spending spree that added a net 901 pubs from the purchase of Mayfair Taverns for £37.4m, Century Inns for £139m and 217 more Bass pubs for £69.3m.

The estate grew steadily with the £118m acquisition of 183 Swallow pubs from Whitbread in 2000. The following year, Enterprise Inns added 439 pubs from Morgan Grenfell Private Equity and 431 pubs from Scottish & Newcastle, paying £266.7m and £269.5m respectively.

But 2002 and 2004 proved to be the key years in the group's meteoric growth. As well as buying 1,860 pubs from Laurel Pub Holdings for £881m in 2002, Enterprise paid £75m for a 16.8% stake in a consortium created to buy 3,210 Unique and 940 Voyager pubs from Japanese investment bank Nomura. These pubs accounted for 7% of the British total.

In March 2004, Enterprise bought out the rest of what had become the Unique Pub Company for £609m. The addition of 4,054 Unique pubs nearly doubled the size of the Enterprise portfolio to more than 9,000 sites, although it sold 239 venues to Admiral Taverns for £61m the following month to avoid referral to the Competition Commission.

The integration of Unique was completed early in 2005 generating cost savings of £25m a year.

Despite this rapid expansion, Enterprise has delivered consistent growth and continuously refined its estate. In the past five years turnover has increased steadily from £172m in 2000 to £713m in 2004, while pre-tax profit has grown from £44.1m to £213m (with a slight blip in 2001).

Last November, Tuppen revealed that only 152 pubs in the Enterprise portfolio were turning in operating profits below £15,000. More than two-thirds of the estate had potential profits in excess of £30,000 and half of these were expected to earn more than £45,000.

In the peer-reviewed Britain's Most Admired Companies 2004 rankings, Enterprise Inns came third in the pub/restaurant top 10 and 59th in the pan-industry top 220.

As well as steering the development of Britain's biggest pub company, Tuppen serves as chairman of the pub and leisure group at the British Beer and Pubs Association.

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