What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (81 page)

I told the guy from Siemens that if he thought he was going to
steal
the company, he'd better think again, as other parties were interested. Without mentioning their names, I told him they were substantial international companies and I was thinking in terms of $150m. Siemens pulled out at that price level, but Bosch and Sony really had the hots for this transaction. Sony had limited activity in mobile phones, while Bosch, a major German manufacturer, was heavily entrenched in the fixed-line telephone business. Their activity in mobiles was limited to buying in Motorola mobile phones and rebranding them Bosch.

There are certain events I will never forget from my electronics days. One of them was the time we announced the dual-band phone at the Hanover Fair. Companies like Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola had massive exhibition stands - they'd spent a fortune at the fair, with their staff all dressed up in matching coloured uniforms, but the crowd was flocking to the Dancall stand. It was inundated with people, even from Ericsson and Nokia, all gathered around our dual-band phone display. Not only had we announced it, we had
proved
it worked - we were demonstrating it there and then, showing how the phone automatically flipped between PCN and GSM without any physical switching. It was a revelation.

So often at exhibitions, companies make big announcements about new items which just turn out to be their
intentions
- we call it 'vapourware'. This was not one of those occasions - word got round the show very quickly that we'd actually
done
it.

The fair's daily magazine placed a big article on the front page, highlighting our dual-band phone as one of the major revelations of the show. This encouraged Sony and Bosch even more. The chief executive of Bosch called for a meeting with me on our stand at Hanover. I told him we were going to send out a final tender document and by 24 March 1997, they would have their last opportunity to put their offer in. He asked me to 'cut to the chase', as the Americans (not the Germans) would say, and give him a definitive price, so I told him that, whatever happened, I wasn't selling this company for less than $150m and that was all I was prepared to say.

With both Sony and Bosch on the hook, it was time to play one off
against the other. But before they would make an offer they had to do some financial checking. We didn't want them going into Dancall, where tongues would wag and the staff would be confused by the rumours flying around left, right and centre, so we set up a data room at Herbert Smith with boxes and boxes of documents on the company's financial and technical affairs. Sony and Bosch were both informed they were in a race, so to speak, and that their tenders had to be in by 24 March, which just happened to be my birthday.

In 1997 it was a special birthday - my fiftieth - and Ann and Nick Hewer had arranged a real slap-up party for me, which would take place on 23 March. Ann tried to keep the party secret from me, but unfortunately it wasn't a surprise because Nick had written to Margaret Thatcher to see if she'd be prepared to come along and her staff had mistakenly replied to my home address. On opening the mail one morning, I stumbled across a letter from Margaret Thatcher wishing me a happy fiftieth birthday and apologising for being unable to attend.

I had a dilemma as to whether or not I should tell Ann that I knew. In the end, I quickly passed her the letter and said, 'I think this is for you - I accidentally opened it. I haven't read it, but I think it's for you.' Nothing more was said, but she knew the surprise was blown. However, she did manage to keep a couple of other major secrets from me.

The party was held at Nick's gentlemen's club, the Reform Club in Pall Mall, and as it got underway, I could see the extent of all the trouble that Ann and Nick had gone to. There were some surprise guests, including Tony Blair, the leader of the New Labour Party, our friends Jeremy Beadle, Maureen Lipman and Tommy Steele, and even Nick Lightowler from Comet. But the biggest surprise of all was yet to come.

Cooped up in a side room was a bunch of people I had lost touch with. Ann and my daughter Louise had got together all my old friends - Geoff Salt, Steve Pomeroy, Tony Kaye and Malcolm Cross, together with their respective wives. I hadn't seen Geoff, Tony or Steve for nearly thirty years and Malcolm for twenty years. I was dumbstruck. It was an amazing surprise, but still not the biggest of the evening.

At the end of dinner, Michael Aspel turned up, presented me with a big red book and said Alan Sugar, this is your life!' Nick had arranged for Michael Aspel to put on a pseudo
This is Your Life
show. Unbeknown to me, a stage was being set downstairs and the guests were invited to leave the dining room and assemble there. People came on the stage to do the famous
This is Your Life
bit and video messages were played from Rupert Murdoch, Jurgen Klinsmann and Bill Gates. Then out on the stage came Gerry Francis,
Tommy Steele, Bill Kenwright the impresario and chairman of Everton, and David Dein from the arch-enemy Arsenal. It was an unbelievable surprise. I was feeling a bit embarrassed sitting through all of this. Loads of people were there, including Stanley Kalms and people from work like Bob Watkins. It was a great night.

The next day, my birthday, we flew off to Marbella, where I'd arranged for my boat to be parked at Puerto Banus. We were going to spend a week there over the forthcoming bank holiday. Early in the afternoon, I received a call from Robert Leitao telling me the tenders had arrived at midday. Bosch had offered $150m. Sony had also put in an offer of $150m, but it was a Mickey Mouse offer - they had done some jiggery-pokery, messing with parts of the balance sheet to make the headline figure look good, but effectively it equated to $50m. The massive gap between the two bids made this a dangerous situation. Obviously I wanted to accept the Bosch offer, but there was still lots more work to do before we got to the contract stage. By now, Sony and Bosch both knew they were fighting against each other. If it leaked out to Bosch that their opponent (and the only other serious player) was offering $100m less than they were, they'd certainly revise their offer.

Shortly after the phone call from Robert, I received a call from Mr Morita. First of all, he congratulated me on my fiftieth birthday - he'd read about it in
The Times
that day - then he asked me whether I'd received his offer. I told him I
had,
but that it only valued the company at $50m. He started to waffle that his offer was for $150m, but when I cut him short, he asked me to give consideration to his offer rather than reject it outright. I simply told him it wasn't good enough and that he'd have to get closer to the $150m, with no caveats. I needed to keep Sony in the loop in case we ended up with a Dutch auction around the $50m mark.

Morita told me he'd flown a team of executives over to England, ready to do the deal and sign contracts. I thanked him, but told him this was academic, as he was way off on price. Nevertheless, he said his team would remain in England until such time as we formally rejected or accepted his offer. I told him again that his people should go back to Japan now, as they were
miles
out and simply wasting my time and his time. Despite that, they stayed.

About an hour later, I received a call from some high-flyer at Bosch, asking me whether their offer was acceptable. I told the guy that there were other people interested in the company and it was now a case of 'first come, first served'. In other words, all the due diligence was over and that anyone ready to sign a contract in the next two days would get the deal. He called me back ten minutes later and said he was prepared to send a team to my lawyers'
office to hammer out a contract. I asked Robert Leitao to get Margaret from Herbert Smith and Tony Dean, our finance director, ready for this meeting. I would fly in the next day on a chartered plane to oversee the discussions. I wasn't going to let this thing go wrong.

In the meantime, I was being pestered by one of the Sony chaps, asking me whether we were prepared to go ahead with their offer. Having arranged the meeting with Bosch, I still wanted to keep the balls in the air in case anything went wrong, but I reiterated to Sony that there was no way we would be selling to them.

Sony, in desperation, got their legal advisers to contact Rothschild, saying that I did not have the authority to make the decision - it was a board decision. As I was merely a shareholder, albeit one who owned 36 per cent, I could not make the decision unilaterally. To avoid any legal claims, after calling the other directors and telling them what was going on, Tony Dean drew up a board minute saying that the board of Amstrad was rejecting the Sony offer and we faxed it to the Sony lawyers to shut them up.

In the meantime, the phones were ringing red-hot from Bosch and Sony. As if I wasn't busy enough, an unexpected visitor turned up at the boat - Sir John Hall, chairman of Newcastle United FC, a very nice man. He was sitting on the aft deck and I asked Daniel to entertain him. I couldn't spare him any time - I was darting backwards and forwards on the phone, one moment speaking to Sony, the next speaking to Bosch. I apologised to John, saying, 'One day I'll tell you what's going on here, but I can't at the moment.' He must have thought I was doing some deal over another Carlos Kickaball player.

I managed to keep the balls in the air between Sony and Bosch and took the plane to London the next morning, arriving at Herbert Smith's office around 11 a.m. Bosch had sent a whole team of senior people over and Margaret Mountford had drafted up a comprehensive contract. I'd been up the whole of the previous night on the boat, talking about the terms on the phone with Robert Leitao.

When you get down to the last contractual stage of any deal, there are always a few show-stoppers. These are normally knocked out of the way by further debate amongst the parties. As the hours passed, the Bosch contingent kept looking at their watches, obviously conscious that the Easter bank holiday was coming up and they wanted to shoot off. It was getting dangerous again. There were four or five show-stoppers still unresolved and they were starting to say, 'Well, perhaps we'll go home and we'll resume this next week, after the bank holiday.'

I reminded them that when I'd spoken to their boss a couple of days
earlier, I'd told him the contract had to be signed today, otherwise all bets would be off and we would start pursuing negotiations with another party from Japan. Bosch had the hots to buy this company - I could see they had been told to do this deal by the powers above - so when I mentioned the other party, they must have panicked a bit.

This was a bit of a bluff and a gamble, but it softened them up and they agreed to my next idea. I could see this mob of jobsworths were desperate to get home for the holidays, so I suggested they leave behind their trusted lawyer and we would print out the signature page of the contract, which everybody would sign now with the exception of their lawyer.
He
would hold on to this signature page and would not exchange it with us until the four remaining points were resolved to his satisfaction. In this way, they could all piss off home (I didn't say piss off) and we could carry on working with their lawyer.

They couldn't sign the piece of paper quick enough.

We now had one man left from Bosch. Tony Dean, Margaret and I slowly wore him down with a kind of three-way pincer movement. The poor sod had been up twenty-four hours, but to be fair, he was a tough nut and he was doing a good job for his firm - he was adamant on some points and would not back down. Tony Dean locked horns with him and one could see there was not going to be a winner.

I stepped in and had a look at the points at issue. I worked out with Margaret which of them was of the least concern to us, then told her I would come back into the room in a few minutes and kind of play-act, asking why we were still arguing over this point. I would big the guy up and concede the point, letting him think I was overriding my people. I'd learned previously that if you box someone too far into a corner, they go into belligerent mode. In the end, the guy accepted and the deal was done. I had sold Dancall for $150m. The announcement of the sale was to be embargoed until the first business day after the bank holiday, so although I flew back to the boat, I had to keep the matter secret from my guests.

What an amazing coup! In two years we had laid out PS16m for Dancall and now (based on the exchange rate at the time) I'd just sold it for PS95m!

At 7 a.m. the following Tuesday, 1 April 1997, the deal was announced. Mr Morita of Sony called me to say I had done a magnificent deal - and of course he could now see I hadn't been blagging him when I'd told him he needed to match the $150m. He was surprised I'd been so honest!

After the deal, I hosted a meeting with the Bosch people in Denmark, who unveiled their plans to the Dancall staff. This included the construction
of a massive factory in Aalborg which would increase capacity at least fivefold. The staff at Dancall were delighted. I had secured their future. Many of them wished me all the best and thanked me for rescuing the company two years earlier and now securing this wonderful deal for them. They asked me to have some photographs taken with the engineering team to celebrate not only the transaction, but also the breakthrough on the dual-band mobile phone.

*

After the sale of Dancall and the failed acquisition of Amstrad by Psion, I started considering ways of reorganising the company. There were no blockbuster products on the horizon to replicate the successes of the mid-eighties, plus I was preoccupied with fire-fighting at Tottenham. I guess I'd stupidly lost interest in Amstrad and in the back of my mind, I wanted a graceful way out. Employing Rogers had failed, even though I'd genuinely attempted to cooperate, in the hope that perhaps
someone
could run the company professionally and properly. On reflection, it goes to show I really
am
what I am - a bit of a one-trick pony. I'm as good as the product or venture I'm involved with at the time.