BRITAIN'S love affair with shopping and gambling is reflected in the latest league table of the country's biggest private companies.
Gala, the betting and bingo firm, is expected to take top spot ahead of the department store group John Lewis Partnership, whose three-year reign as the biggest firm ended last year when it was toppled by Coral Eurobet.
Gala's £2.18bn acquisition
of Coral last October created a group with combined sales well north of £6bn.
The sales figure is comfortably higher than that of John Lewis, which reported turnover of £5.1bn ex-VAT. The Coral deal also turned Gala into Britain's biggest private equity owned business.
Grampian Country Foods has maintained its position as the biggest private company in Scotland, but slipped one place from 12th to 13th in the Top Track 100 compiled by KPMG.
Now in its fifth year, and published today, the table ranks Britain's 100 biggest private companies by latest sales and this year gambling firms and retailers feature among the biggest in the country. BetFred is among the bookies in the list and Bet365 makes its first appearance.
Somerfield, with sales of £4.68bn, is a new entry to the top 10 at third biggest while chemicals company Ineos Group moves up one place to fifth.
Among the famous names in the list are Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic and Sir Philip Green's Bhs and Arcadia retail chains. This year's list includes six firms headquartered in Scotland, compared with five last year.
Aberdeen-based Grampian held on to top Scottish position despite competition from European cheap imports and higher transport costs which forced the company to close six factories last year. Fred Duncan's company still managed to increase sales by £138m to £1.85bn.
Car dealer Arnold Clark remains second biggest Scottish firm, moving up from 17th to 15th. It moves up the table with sales of £1.67bn in 2005, against £1.59bn a year earlier. Sir Arnold Clark says he will be spending £4m on improving his car showrooms in 2006 in a bid to stay ahead of the competition.
Britain's biggest private housebuilder and property company Miller Group has risen from 41st to 34th biggest private firm in Britain, and third biggest in Scotland, with sales of £893m. Chief executive Keith Miller was recently named Scottish Entrepreneur of the Year in the Ernst & Young awards and has overseen 12 years of successive profits growth.
One place behind in the Scottish ranking is private equity owned Kwik-Fit, the tyre and exhaust chain which is 38th with £795m sales, a rise from 42nd last year.
The fifth biggest Scottish firm is oil services supplier Asco, which has fallen from 73rd to 92nd, despite increasing operating profits fourfold last year to £20m on sales of £416m. However, the figures do not tell the whole story as last year's table used the 2003 turnover of £467m rather than the 2004 figure of £348m which was not available at the time. Had the later figure been used it would have seen Asco dropping out of the table altogether. This year's turnover therefore reflects a sharp upturn in business under chairman Claude Littner and deputy chairman Andrew Mallett, who were recruited in 2004.
The sixth Scottish firm on the list is frozen foods retailer Farmfoods, based in Glasgow, which creeps in at 95th with sales of £407m.
Together the six Scottish firms directly employ 43,000 staff, and had combined sales of £6bn in their latest financial year, when they made profits of £293m.
Craig Anderson, head of KPMG in Scotland, said: "Ambitious entrepreneurial companies are a crucial part of the UK's economy and it is great to see Scotland represented in the Top Track 100.
"Grampian is a great example for the region's businesses to aspire to, and I hope the region will be even more strongly represented next year."
The 100 companies generated combined sales of £106bn and directly employed more than 887,000 staff, representing around 10% of GDP and 3% of the UK workforce.
Most of those on the league table are based in London (27) and the Midlands (25), with a fifth in the South-East (20). The remainder of the breakdown is: North (12), Scotland (6), East (4), South-West (4) and Wales (2).
Companies have to be registered in the UK and unquoted. They must be ultimate holding companies, not subsidiaries. They may have their ultimate holding company offshore, but businesses with the majority of sales generated by quoted subsidiaries are excluded.
Firms with fewer than 100 employees are excluded, as are not-for-profit companies, co-operative societies, member-owned buying groups, mutual societies, provident associations, betting exchanges and partnerships, such as lawyers and accountants.
• The research was carried out by Fast Track between April 1 and June 1 2006.
