re Manchester - the rule of thumb that I've read before is that a bus company with revenue of £1m/pa is worth £1m (i.e. the asset value of a company is roughly the same as the annual turnover). I've seen mention of it once being worth "£100m" on paper but now being sold for only a fifth of that amount.
Does anyone know when that £100m figure related to? e.g. was that for the combined revenue including Wigan operations and before Metrolink opened to Oldham/Rochdale? I'm just trying to get my head round exactly how much of a discount they are willing to taken on Manchester (was the £100m only ever a "book value" five or ten years ago and the operation never stood a chance of being sold for anything like that in 2019?
What with Manchester on the chopping block, I wouldn't be suprised to see First South Yorkshire follow suit or at least Doncaster Depot especially with possibility of strike action.
I'm not saying it wont' happen (a week ago I wouldn't have believed that First would be pulling out of Manchester yet retaining Rotherham/ Stirling etc!) but one complicating factor with Doncaster being split off is what would happen to the services in Rotherham (where Doncaster operate some of the "town services" and Sheffield do others, but for operational efficiencies a number of services are shared between the two depots, just a case of which duty can be squeezed onto which board).
I've been told for a long time on here that First would only sell the smaller bits of the UK bus operation and would never consider selling the Crown Jewels (e.g. Potteries might go but not the big city stuff), but things have clearly changed.
In some ways, South Yorkshire could be an attractive operation to take over - there's generally peace with Stagecoach, there's a reasonably supportive PTE (albeit cash constrained, but which PTEs aren't these days...), most of the "marginal" stuff around Sheffield has been ditched (or taken over by the likes of TM Travel etc), so it seems a relatively safe company to take over (compared to, say, buying depots that are in the middle of bus wars like Livingston). The fleet has been slowly getting rid of the B7Ls and Presidents (as second hand Geminis from Glasgow and Leeds headed south).
The fact that they've not bothered giving us a "local" livery might point to them not planning on keeping FSY in the long term?
Sheffield isn't as good as it used to be - the 2004 strike/ the Stagecoach incursion into most of the lucrative corridors etc - but the city centre is picking up again - so it might look better now than five years ago.
Take the Rotherham routes out of the equation and Doncaster is quite a self contained operation (bar the X78 to Sheffield), in a town where until recently bus services could be run on a hub/spoke basis - the waterways/ railways mean that pretty much everything ran into/through the town centre - instead of building an Out Of Town shopping mall, they built the Frenchgate right in the town centre - so the bus remains competitive for a lot of journeys (given that the shopping centre is right above the bus station) -there's almost no suburban railway services to compete with buses - so it could be good bus territory. But recently the town has started to change - a lot of employment now "out of town" (e.g. Amazon warehouses) - take a look at the 57/58 group of services to see how First have tried to cope with new housing developments and out of town attractions (Yorkshire Wildlife Park, Airport) - it's a complicated/ clever/ confusing mix of ten minute and half hourly services which mean a lot of people have got to memorise different route numbers and cross-reference up to three timetables to work out what used to be one simple service/timetable (e.g. the 170 to Cantley).
They've had a few Streetlites in the last couple of years but also been the dumping ground for the worst of the FSY fleet - partly because vehicles knackered by Sheffield hills can have a gentler retirement on flat Doncaster services - but you could certainly argue that they've not looked after what they have - the Stagecoach fleet in (roughly similarly sized, roughly similarly economically affected) Barnsley looks significantly better and more inviting.
But Stagecoach certainly wouldn't be allowed to buy FSY and I don't know who else has the cash/inclination to take on something of that size/ Go Ahead run EYMS around Hull though so maybe it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they'd be interested in Doncaster. Or TrentBarton... not so far from their Mansfield operations to Donny?
After Manchester has come up for sale though, it might be unwise to speculate too much as the conventional wisdom (that First would only really be interested in selling operations that nobody would want to pay much for - e.g. after dumping Northampton/ Plymouth etc they'd not consider selling anything A-list and only accept offers for little bits like Halifax/ Stoke... Manchester has turned that "wisdom" on its head - we might see a First that has recouped its losses by selling up in big cities but continues to operate in smaller places like Falkirk... who knows!