Throwing stones in glass houses...

Listening last week to Regent Inns chairman Bob Ivell - aka 'The Consolidator', viz his mantra on mergers in the hospitality sector - I was minded to recall the old Biblical phrase about the bloke who proposes to cast the first stone needing to ensure he has his own ducks all in a row before doing so.

Private equity firm Cognetas might well have paid too much for Novus Leisure, as Ivell suggested when announcing the results of his own business. As many will recall, two years ago Regent was engaged in a fairly rancorous tussle to buy the Tiger Tiger operator, finally baulking at paying what Cognetas - then Electra Partners - was prepared to stump up.

But there are those who argue that Ivell and his team themselves splashed out too much - £26m - buying the Old Orleans restaurant chain from Punch Taverns last year. And that Regent and its shareholders many have to wait a while longer than planned to see the returns from the investment. Could this be a form of 'karma'? Perhaps.

It's true enough that the eating-out market currently remains buoyant. Despite the first signs of a consumer slowdown few are prepared to countenance the possibility that this flourishing sector will turn the wrong corner.

But nevertheless, the jury remains out on quite how successful the Old Orleans concept will prove to be in the long term.

Magners

There is an element of schadenfreude​ on the part of UK cider manufacturers at the plight of Irish cider manufacturer C&C Group - if you can call a 75 per cent share of its given market a 'plight'. Profits are sliding, share is slipping and jobs, it seems, are threatened.

These are competitive times, with producers fighting to get their products in the nation's pubs. Some suggest the Magners producer was a touch arrogant when it first came to the UK.

Still, the kicking C&C is getting at the moment seems slightly overdone, however much the group might have misread things recently.

After all, it reinvigorated cider as a 'genre' and marketed the stuff to a 'T', paving the way for others to dust off their brands and up their own ante in a market that had lain bereft of innovation for some time.