Are ISA overhauls really enough to reinvigorate British markets?

Last week, US confectionary giant Mars made a takeover bid for Hotel Chocolat which valued the AIM-traded company at £524m (or 375p a share) - a whopping 170% premium to the previous day’s closing price.
Now that looks pretty exciting for the company’s investors until you take a look at the share price chart.


Hotel Chocolat listed at 200p per share in May 2016. In July 2021, management raised £40m from shareholders in a placing at 355p per share. The bid from Mars offers the investors who bought into that placing just a 6% premium.
And Hotel Chocolat is not the only UK-listed company whose share price weakness has caught the attention of opportunistic dealmakers. Halfords has recently walked away from merger talks with Redde-Northgate stating the offer on the table undervalued the business. Halfords is currently worth £500m, which is about half the value it reached during 2021 when the UK was in the midst of its post-pandemic cycling boom. The merger offer from Redde-Northgate would have built a combined business worth £1.4bn and offered shareholders no premium.
Looking at market performance charts from the last few years, it’s hardly surprising that the UK is ripe for consolidation....