Betting the Business

Speaking at GlaxoSmithKline’s annual results presentation last week, CEO Andrew Witty disclosed some of the strategies the company is employing to manage the risk posed by the Eurozone debt crisis:

We sweep all of our cash raised during the day out of the local banks and send it to banks here in the U.K. which we think are robust and secure. … We don’t leave any cash in most European countries. … And we’ve done that with a huge focus on getting paid. Like all things, if you focus on it, then eventually you do get paid.

GSK is not alone. According to the WSJ, Switzerland’s Novartis changed the incentives for its sales force in countries with significant debt issues, to collect the cash, not just generate the sales and put receivables on the company’s balance sheet. And Vodafone moves cash out of Greece every evening to guard against an exit from the euro, according to its CFO Andy Halford.

In some earlier posts, we have described some of the risk mitigating strategies by companies doing business in the Eurozone–here, here and here. The case made public by the CEO of GSK shows that companies also take precautionary actions by moving money across borders and between banks, as well as by taking steps to claw back money owed them by clients in financially distressed economies. Racing cash out of troubled zones is often done by multinationals operating in third-world countries. What is new is the use of that in first-world Europe.

One might ask whether this is a good way to actively manage risks, since it appears that by cutting funds to these countries companies like GSK are making the crisis worse and increasing their own risks of doing business.

Asked why GSK has taken these steps, Witty replied:

There was a period when things looked more worrying. The action that the [European Central Bank] took over the last six months has clearly had a very positive effect on bank liquidity and confidence. But there was a period last year when every day you were getting a phone call about Bank A, B or C which was perceived to be about to go or there were risks or there was anxiety about different banks in different countries. And we did a very comprehensive review about which banks we thought were the strongest and which weren’t. We moved our cash accordingly.

Witty’s remarks highlight the problem of bank (or country) runs. Whether GSK stays or leaves, it matters little, for if others leave the system collapses. The only way to avoid failure is if everybody stayed, but this is impossible to coordinate when each suspects that the others might leave. Such belief is by itself sufficient to bring down the system. Thus, the role for Leviathan, in Witty’s words impersonated by the ECB, and its actions to provide liquidity and confidence.

One final remark: When asked what the hedging strategy is with the money brought back daily to the U.K., Witty replied:

Remember that we pay our dividend in sterling so actually bringing the cash back to the U.K. is not a bad thing anyway because we always have use for sterling-denominated resources, so it’s really not an issue for us.

Surely that can’t be the whole story, for Witty understands that there are many ways to hedge exchange rate risk. The real problems are the concern over counterparty risk (banking freeze) and having money locked in a country that might fall off the cliff and impose capital controls.  Witty still remembers an emerging markets crisis where the “general manager took bags of money to people’s [GSK staff’s] houses”.