The company
Glass half full
There may be nothing so quintessentially British as the pub, but the 21st century has seen many challenges to its business model. According to Altus, in 2022 the total number of UK pubs (including those vacant) fell below 40,000 for the first time. But rumours of the death of the British pub are perhaps exaggerated. In no small part thanks to the efforts of the Campaign for Real Ale, how consumers consume beer has been, if not reinvented, at least tweaked. The number of breweries has doubled to more than 2,400 in the past decade (according to UHY Hacker Young research), driven by the increase in independent brewers, while bars catering for ‘craft ale’ drinkers – who no longer look like the stereotypical real ale drinker of 20 years ago – have sprung up.
It’s against this backdrop, as the UK began to emerge from the pandemic, that Oaktree Capital backed former Greene King CEO Anand Rooney’s idea to snap up iconic and unique pubs across the UK. RedCat was founded in February 2021.
The personality
Safe hands
Rooney Anand, RedCat’s founder and executive chairman, was chief executive of Greene King from 2005 to 2019. He is also chair of CVC Capital-backed Away Resorts and Langholm Capital-backed Purity Soft Drinks, and is senior independent director for Wm Morrison Supermarkets.
Prior to Greene King, he was with Sara Lee Bakery and before that United Biscuits, McVitie’s and Terry’s.
In October last year, Phil Birbeck took over as CEO of RedCat from Chris Hill, who was appointed chief executive when the business was founded. Birbeck was managing director of Whitbread’s pub division for more than five years.
CFO Steven Trowbridge is a member of the Corporate Finance Faculty and is also an ACA, who trained with EY in the 1990s. He was previously CFO of Arena Events, Evans Cycles and HSS Hire, and worked for Thomson Reuters.
Dave Foulis is RedCat’s corporate finance director. He trained as an ACA with BDO and specialised in the real estate sector, before moving to Honest Burgers as FD. He joined RedCat in July 2021.
The acquisitions
Last orders
August 2022 was a busy month for RedCat in the southwest of England. It acquired the Moorland Hotel in Dartmoor and the Swan Hotel in Wells, Somerset (below) for undisclosed amounts, and paid £8m for Jamaica Inn – the Cornish smugglers’ inn made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name. Anand said he remained confident in RedCat’s “strategy to invest in high-quality pub hotels”, despite the sector’s challenges.
The previous month, RedCat went shopping in Norfolk, acquiring The Pheasant Hotel in Holt and the Blakeney Manor Hotel on the north Norfolk coast. It also bought the Cock Inn in Muggington, Derbyshire, and the Meynell Ingram Arms in Burton-on-Trent – the home of brewing in the Midlands.
These acquisitions were made through the Coaching Inn Group, which RedCat acquired from BGF in August 2021, when it owned 18 historic hotels – it now has a portfolio of 32 inns. BDO was lead adviser to BGF on the deal.
The same month, RedCat’s backer Oaktree Capital injected further equity into the business (reported as between £10m and £20m). Oaktree had committed a £200m war chest to the pubs start-up when it was founded by Anand and NatWest had provided a revolving credit facility to support its M&A strategy.
RedCat’s first acquisition was in March 2021 – 42 pubs for an undisclosed sum from TDR Capital-backed Stonegate Group, the biggest owner of pubs in the UK. By the end of 2022, in addition to the 32 inns, RedCat owned more than 120 pubs.
