The debate over focus versus diversification is excellent news for the bankers and lawyers who swoop around a deal-rich environment like voracious gulls following a trawler. They’ll charge you to tweak your portfolio either way, safe in the knowledge that fashions always change and that one day even the loon pant will once again become the sine qua non for the flâneur of the boulevards. On the one hand you have the confident investor wanting to access a pure play, on the other the reassurance that nobody’s likely to stuff up a wide range of operations all at once. This is particularly pertinent in the BEE field, where a lot of groups have been pretty opportunistic. If a decent looking deal comes along you grab it, no matter what sort of a field it’s in — and why wouldn’t you, as, to a large degree, it’s funded by other people’s money and your downside is minimal. So the groups that have evolved and gone on to succeed may not look like anything you’d find in a Harvard Business School...
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