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Marks and Spencer gets Rose revival treatment

At last, Stuart Rose has said it: the "R word". Marks and Spencer is finally in "recovery" after 30 months of the Rose treatment.

  • Financial Times
  • Published: 00:00 January 16, 2007
  • Gulf News

At last, Stuart Rose has said it: the "R word". Marks and Spencer is finally in "recovery" after 30 months of the Rose treatment. "We are out of intensive care," said the retailer's chief executive, throwing out best-in-class Christmas numbers last week. "Now we have to get super-fit."

Of course, we all knew it a long time ago. Journalists had spent the past year pestering him to make the call, while the markets decided the moment had come seven months ago when the shares hit a 10-year high. But now, it is official. The darling of the British high street is back in business. After years of profiting from M&S's misery, it is now its rivals who are feeling the pain.

This is a big moment for Rose, who many analysts and investors - and even shoppers - believed could not turn the ageing brand around. "When he started at M&S he had bags of hate mail arriving a foot deep every week," says a rival chief executive who has known Rose for more than 20 years. "He read it all - I would have thrown it away. Now he loves the approbation he is getting."

But Rose, who himself admitted to being "under the cosh" when he issued a post-Christmas profits warning in January 2005, is refusing to be ebullient. He is being resolutely downbeat. "It is a small r."

For a man who calls himself "a bit of a Champagne Charlie", enjoys the limelight and is known as something of a charmer, such sobriety flies in the face of his natural effusiveness. "I am very aware of the fact that as we move forward expectations rise and the bar keeps rising and we have got to keep delivering," said the 57-year-old in an interview late last year. "That is what I feel, a great deal of responsibility is what I feel."

When he was parachuted into M&S to see off Sir Philip Green's indicative bid in May 2004, Rose was finally coming home after 15 years of self-imposed exile. His competitors and contemporaries knew he had the charm to win over the shop floor staff, but some questioned whether he really had the skills to make M&S sing.

Single-minded pursuit

He has had a mixed past. He is not like the feted Sir Terry Leahy, who joined Tesco and worked his way up, never wavering from his single-minded pursuit of making the supermarket chain the best in the UK and one of the leading competitors in the world.

By his own admission, he was a drifter in his youth. He grew up in Tanzania, where his father worked for the Colonial Office. His mother wanted him to become a doctor but he was not naturally academic. He worked at the BBC for a bit and then landed a place on the M&S trainee programme when he was 23.

He says it was his mother Margaret's suicide just a year later that helped focus his mind.

"My mother was fiercely ambitious for me and she taught me, if nothing else, one thing: she taught me to value myself and my philosophy."

But his rise to the top was not as linear as Sir Terry's, whose card was marked at a very early age. Rose, who quit M&S just before he hit 40, having decided that he was not going to get into the senior ranks, followed a more haphazard route. He did stints in the Burton Group, Arcadia, Argos and Booker before his homecoming.

"I was never a favoured son of the business," says Rose, looking back on his days under Lord Sieff, chairman from 1972 to 1984. "I was never one of those people. I sat on the edge of the plate. People couldn't decide if I was half-genius or half-mad."

Having quit M&S in 1989, Rose joined Sir Ralph Halpern and John Hoerner at Burton Group. He worked under Sir Ralph, learning about property acquisitions, cash flows and balance sheets. But even here, says one former colleague of the time, Rose was not the favoured son.

Second fiddle

It was Terry Green, the former chief executive of Allders, who was Hoerner's favourite. 'He did play the second fiddle to Terry in Arcadia. John always favoured him," says a contemporary.

In the late 1990s Rose led Argos's defence against GUS and went on to restructure Booker. He moved to Arcadia in 2000, where he gained a reputation as a turnround specialist before selling it to Sir Philip Green for £800 million in 2002.

He pocketed £25 million from that deal, helping to keep him in tailored suits and Hermes ties while also indulging his passions for flying and fine wine. Sir Philip, who remains friends with Rose in spite of their public tussle over M&S, describes his rival as "nice, charming and ruthless".

Now, more than three decades after walking into M&S's offices as a young man with few prospects, Rose is at last the favourite son.

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