About MGH

The MGH Conglomerate is a privately held British group with two operating divisions, Production and Defence. Founded in 1974, the group employs 2,300 permanent staff and recorded turnover of £184.2m for FY02/03. Registered-office, telephone and direct-contact details are withheld from this lowside website.

The group slogan, Two Divisions. One Standard., is not an exercise in poetry so much as an operating instruction. One company supplies stewarding, lighting, sound, power and temporary structures to more than 400 events each year; the other supplies multi-source decision platforms, maritime awareness systems and precision effectors to government customers. Both are expected to plan early, document properly, and leave less to chance than the client had originally proposed.

History

The company was founded in 1974. The events business grew first, and in 1981 the defence arm was established around signals-analysis work that required the same habits of preparation, record-keeping and discretion, only indoors and at greater length. By 1994 the present holding company structure had been adopted, placing the two trading subsidiaries beneath the MGH Conglomerate.

Two later milestones are cited internally rather more often than anniversaries. The first is 1998, when our CEO died. The second is the 1999 Meridian Pavilion contract at Greenwich for the millennium period, still the largest single event production assignment undertaken by the group. The pavilion's name was subsequently borrowed, with characteristic economy, for MERIDIAN™, first delivered to a government customer in 2001. MGH has been happy ever since to let a temporary building lend its name to a permanent software line.

The Board

The board combines operational management with a deliberate surplus of people inclined to ask for the underlying paper. That disposition suits a group in which one division may be discussing steward deployment at Cheltondale County Show while another is reviewing export licensing and trial evidence. Investor material is issued privately through Investor Relations; directors do not conduct a public market dialogue because there is no listed equity with which to conduct it.

Group structure

MGH is a straightforward holding structure. The parent company owns two wholly owned subsidiaries: MGH Production Ltd and MGH Defence Ltd. Group recruitment policy is set centrally; operating responsibility remains divisional.

There are no quoted affiliates, no overseas subsidiaries and no decorative corporate layers retained from old transactions. The events company operates depots and crews across the United Kingdom; the defence company conducts controlled work from British sites under British licensing. Clients, suppliers and applicants who need the correct postal route should use Contact Us, which has the ordinary addresses and numbers, rather than relying on whatever a directory assistant may still have on file.

Principal sites

Financial summary

The broad trend is visible without assistance: the events division has grown steadily; the defence division has grown faster; and the group has remained private while financing that growth from retained earnings and conservative banking facilities. A fuller summary may be obtained from Investor Relations by post.

Ownership

MGH is privately held and has no listed equity. The MGH Family Trust holds 61.4 per cent of the ordinary shares. The MGH Employee Benefit Trust holds 8.2 per cent, giving long-serving staff a direct, if sensibly limited, interest in the business. Directors and senior management hold 6.9 per cent, and the remaining 23.5 per cent is held by a small number of private shareholders subject to pre-emption arrangements. The result is a structure that allows patience, which in both divisions has generally proved cheaper than haste.

Page last updated 3 March 2003. This page is best viewed at 800 × 600 in Internet Explorer 5.