Philip Bowman is reminding investors he has more strings to his bow than knowing how to sell companies. True, he sold Scottish Power to Iberdrola within months of arriving. But he put Allied Domecq through a six-year fitness programme before marrying it to Pernod Ricard. Break-up talk on his arrival in December at Smiths Group, the then underperforming engineering conglomerate, has abated. The model is clearly going to be closer to that at the scotch-maker than at the Scottish generator.

The Australian-born chief executive has reorganised three divisions into five, shifted management from head office to divisional headquarters – four of the five in the US – and shrunk corporate HQ. He has moved senior executives onto a modish private equity-style incentive scheme. Restructuring will cost £48m but aims to deliver £47m annual savings within three years. Perhaps crucially, he has set realistic three-year targets for divisional sales and margins that, if met, should add a couple of percentage points to organic growth.