"Lüko Willms" wrote in message

Am 05.01.2012 15:39, schrieb Graham Nye:
In the UK, shares of state-owned companies ("nationalised", in our
terminology) aren't traded on a stock exchange. All shares are
retained by the state and none are sold.

Only if the state decides to sell the company ("privatise" it) will
the shares be released for trading in a stock exchange.

or selling chunks of shares directly to an "investor".

Did they put the shares of British Rail up for sale on the stock
exchange? Not as far as I know.

No, the assumption was that there wouldn't be much interest in buying
the loss-making BR as a whole. They also wanted to introduce internal
competition within the railway system, so that there would be multiple
owners of rolling stock, multiple passenger operators, multiple freight
companies, multiple track maintenance companies, etc, all competing with
each other as far as possible (which never really happened). The belief
was that these companies would be potentially profitable (after the
government's subsidy for running socially necessary services), and small
enough for private buyers to be interested in buying/operating them,
particularly if the sales prices were quite low. The government was
initially going to retain Railtrack under state ownership, but then
decided to sell it anyway, and it was floated on the stock market. As so
much expertise had been stripped from it, Railtrack was initially run
more as a property company which simply bought in specialist services
rather than an engineering and service company.

It is an interesting speculative exercise to try and guess what might
have happened had BR been successfully privatised as one single
integrated company, as happened with some of the early privatised
utilities (eg, British Gas). It might well have been a great success,
just as many of the early privatisations have been (eg, BT, BA, BG).