That’s the stock market for you. Put UK companies in its big cement mixer and out can come some weird looking stuff. Take this for example: an outfit lucky enough to be turning business away whose core operations are valued at pretty much zip. How does that stack up?
It’s the riddle of Balfour Beatty: the construction outfit that looks built for these times but which, on a basic sum-of-the-parts valuation, may as well give up the day job. It has a market cap of £2.1 billion.
But you can get most of the way there simply by adding its £1.3 billion infrastructure investment portfolio to its average annual net cash of £700 million. Have investors missed its construction wing, forecast to have £9.6 billion
