10 platinum investments

THE lifecycle of companies has been shrinking for years. A recent study from Yale University suggested that the average lifespan of a publicly listed company in America had fallen from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today. Another concluded that in any group of companies only half of them could be expected to still be around in ten years’ time.

Companies have always come and gone. It’s part of the process of creative destruction. Innovations come along that render obsolete what went before. It’s the price we pay for progress.

So, in the week that we celebrate the Queen’s remarkable platinum jubilee – 70 years on the throne – it is interesting to look at the handful of companies that have remained at the top of Britain’s corporate ladder throughout the past seven decades. What qualities have enabled them to match our monarch’s impressive longevity?

Here are ten leading quoted companies that were operating at the time of Her Majesty’s ascension in 1952 and are still hard at it today. As the table below shows, some of them were already well-established businesses 70 years ago.

1. Royal Mail – founded in 1516
2. WH Smith – founded in 1792
3. Burberry – founded in 1856
4. Sainsbury’s – founded in 1869
5. Marks & Spencer – founded in 1884
6. Tate & Lyle – founded 1885
7. Rolls Royce – founded in 1904
8. Aston Martin – founded in 1913
9. Unilever – founded in 1927
10. Greggs – founded in 1939/ first store opened in 1951

So, what can we learn from this list of corporate survivors? What do they have in common that’s allowed them to see off their rivals and stay on top of their game?

The first thing that jumps out is that nearly all have powerful brand names. In part that’s just a reflection of the time they’ve been a part of our lives. But it also suggests that they are companies that we have come to have a real affinity with. It’s hard to imagine them not being there.

The second theme is the defensiveness of their businesses. They make or sell things that we cannot do without. No surprise that three of the ten are food retailers. Whatever the state of the economy, we will continue to eat, so Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Greggs are well protected from the ups and downs of the business cycle.

Food is not the only staple provided by the companies on the list. Unilever’s portfolio of household goods is a roll call of familiar names, from Hellmann’s to Knorr, Wall’s to Omo. Marks & Spencer has been clothing us for as long as it has been feeding us. Tate & Lyle has been keeping us sweet since the Queen’s almost equally long-serving great grandmother was in Buckingham Palace.

When the new Queen Elizabeth II returned from Kenya to step into her late father’s shoes, flying was a luxury available to few. Rolls-Royce was probably better known for its cars than its aero engines. Today, the company has around 28,000 civil and military engines in service around the world. The company literally keeps us in the air. And while we are waiting to get on board, WH Smith is happy to sell us a magazine to while away the hours.

The rich are different, they say. For them, the ebb and flow of the economy is neither here nor there, so it is also not a surprise that luxury goods have been another key to corporate longevity. Burberry’s iconic trench coats are always in fashion and who wouldn’t want to emulate that other great British survivor, James Bond, in his trademark Aston Martin car?

The oldest company on our list is perhaps the one that is most at risk from the changes sweeping the latter years of the second Elizabethan age. Royal Mail now delivers more parcels than letters almost none of us writes to each other anymore but we pretty much all do a growing proportion of our shopping online.