Menzies Aviation faces £560m takeover by Kuwaiti rival

Menzies Aviation, one of Scotland's largest firms, is likely to be taken over by a Kuwait-based rival.

The Edinburgh-based ground services company, formerly bookseller John Menzies, works in 37 countries.

Three previous offers from National Aviation Services, which works in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, had been rejected.

A fourth offer of £560m has now been recommended to shareholders in a statement from company directors.

The firm started in 1833 selling Charles Dickens books and The Scotsman newspaper, and became a high street name across the UK.

It became one of Britain's biggest newspaper distributors, expanding into air freight from 1987.

The company cut more than 17,500 jobs worldwide in March 2020 because of the downturn in air travel due to the pandemic, but remained one of Scotland's biggest businesses.

NAS has expanded across emerging markets in recent years and now owns a 19% stake in Menzies Aviation after purchasing millions of pounds worth of shares in the past month.

Its final offer of 608p per share follows previous bids of 460p, 510p and 605p.

"The board has considered the final proposal and indicated to NAS that it would be willing unanimously to recommend an offer at the financial terms of the final proposal to Menzies shareholders," the board said in a statement.

"Accordingly, the board is in discussions with NAS in relation to these terms and will be providing NAS with access to management and due diligence information."

It added that NAS had confirmed to the board that "the financial terms of the final proposal are final and will not be increased," although this could change if someone else tried to take over Menzies Aviation.

Philipp Joeinig, Menzies Aviation's chairman and chief executive, described previous offers as "unsolicited and highly opportunistic" which did not reflect the company's true value.

Menzies Aviation has 25,000 employees in 37 countries, providing passenger, baggage and aircraft handling services.

For more than a century, John Menzies was a steadfast high street presence across the UK.

Just over 20 years ago, it vanished from town centres and railway stations. But the business has continued to grow, from a Victorian bookseller in Scotland's capital, into a massive distribution firm then a global aviation services business.

Its founder, the original John Menzies, was a man with a talent for finding a niche and adapting to a changing society.

He became an apprentice bookseller in Edinburgh after leaving school. When his father died, Menzies left a job in London's Fleet Street and returned home.

Spotting a gap in the market, he opened Scotland's first wholesale bookseller - the first John Menzies shop at 61 Princes Street, Edinburgh in 1833. He was just 25.

Not only did he become the Scottish agent of Dicken's first book - the Pickwick Papers - and the periodical Punch, but he also took the unusual step of selling The Scotsman over the counter.

By the 1860s he had secured the rights to bookstalls in railway stations across Scotland, gradually expanding his stock to supply items useful to travellers on the burgeoning railways network.

It was his sons, John R and Charles Menzies, who expanded the business further, taking advantage of 20th Century innovation to use motorcars instead of horses and adapting as the First World War created a bigger demand for news distribution.

By 1965, five years after the company was incorporated, John Menzies had 90 wholesale warehouses, 350 railway bookstalls and 161 shops.

The first link to air travel came with the 1948 launch of a bookstall at Edinburgh Turnhouse Airport but by the 1980s John Menzies' daily distribution of 26.5m newspapers put the company in a position to move into overnight and heavy freight.

The retail presence vanished from the high street in the late 1990s as rival WH Smith acquired its shops.

By then the company was a global distribution service with a focus on cargo handling and passenger services.

Menzies later acquired the world's largest into-plane fuelling business and ditched the distribution side of the company in 2018.

Menzies Aviation, as it is now known, operates on six continents, but retains its base in Edinburgh just five miles from where John Menzies began.