There's far too much of that here, isn't there? There seems to be little or no understanding of the concept that a UK-based business can have most of its value outside the UK.
Arriva is an interesting one. From a UK based organisation (Cowie Group) it has developed into an international organisation in which the UK operations are now almost a sideshow.
UK rail is pretty much irrelevant as it's time-limited by the length of the franchises, so it would be easy enough for a new owner to leave them to natural redundancy; UK bus seems to me to be constantly retrenching (albeit not with the rapidity of First), so it's the international operations which have sale value.
And I'm not totally sure how much sale value they have; they rely heavily on contracts in non-deregulated markets with only partial contract liberalisation, i.e. there's not much competition yet. As countries liberalise their transport policies, I'm not sure Arriva has the ability to morph from semi-municipal/quasi-state operations to genuine competition; they certainly haven't done hugely well in a free market context here.
I suspect that DB won't get their purchase price back, but it might be a worthwhile sale anyway in case the whole Arriva operation ends up as more of a liability than anything else.
