Flying Flowers paid £13
Flying Flowers paid £13.5m for Stanley Gibbons in June 1998 but was immediately hit by trading problems and profits warnings. Having peaked at 592.5p in 1998 the shares fell to 95p this January. They closed 2.5p lower at 137.5p yesterday.Robert Norbury, the chairman, said: "I am trying to repair the damage done. The Stanley Gibbons deal was at the wrong price and at the wrong time."The biggest loser in the affair has been Paul Fraser who accepted shares in Flying Flowers when he sold Stanley Gibbons. His £13.5m is worth around £4m.He is staying on as chairman of the de-merged business which will be called Communitie and listed on AIM.
It will include Stanley Gibbons, which has a burgeoning online business and Collector Café, a community Web site.Flying Flowers will be re-named Flying Brands to reflect the broader spread of its interests which includes the Gardening Direct mail-order operation.Flying Flowers also announced a full year loss of £7.8m yesterday. This was largely as a result of £4.7m of exceptional charges related to a £7.7m write-down on the value of Stanley Gibbons.. Kingston Communications, the Hull-based telecoms company that entered the FTSE 100 a fortnight ago, yesterday moved to offer a range of mobile phone services in association with BT Cellnet from April. Kingston Communications, the Hull-based telecoms company that entered the FTSE 100 a fortnight ago, yesterday moved to offer a range of mobile phone services in association with BT Cellnet from April. Kingston will market mobile services in its east Yorkshire service area to business and residential users.
It will also offer mobile services to customers of its Torch business telecoms subsidiary and customers of Kingston Business Communications, a telecoms equipment business.Steve Maine, chief executive, said customers would soon number in the tens of thousands and that start-up losses would be incurred in the first year, although the impact on group-level profits is expected to be marginal.Kingston plans to charge a monthly mobile subscription fee of £12.60, undercutting existing operators. Local calls will be priced at 8.5p per minute with national calls at 10.5p, subject to further volume and loyalty discounts. Kingston claims this will undercut BT Cellnet by between 10 and 27 per cent.Mobile handsets will display the Kingston or Torch name, and the company plans to handle customer service calls itself. Integrating fixed and mobile services will result in customers having a combined voice mailbox and receiving a single bill.Kingston stock closed up 5p at 1103p.. Ken Livingstone's plan to use bonds to fund billions of extra investment in the Tube would be much more expensive than the Government's alternative of a public-private partnership, a report said today.