Current Account thinks that Mr Denis Brosnan was a little bit disingenuous when he said he was surprised at market reaction to his decision to step down as Kerry Group chief executive now instead of in three years.

He is handing over the reins to Mr Hugh Friel and becomes chairman of the Kerry Group at the end of the year.

The reality is that people were taken by surprise by the timing of the boardroom reshuffle as

Mr Brosnan had clearly indicated in the past that he expected to step down in three years time when he reached his 60th birthday. Now he is going three years early, although few believe that his move to the chairman's seat will result in his disengagement from the group's expansion over the next five years or so.

Mr Brosnan's move out of the chief executive's office is a milestone in Kerry's history, as he is the first to step down of the Brosnan-Friel-Cregan triumvirate, which has dominated the Kerry top management for the best part of 30 years. It is undoubtedly the beginning of ushering in the next generation of Kerry managers to the Kerry top table.

Mr Friel was understandably coy when asked this week how long he is likely to be in the chief executive's offices. But many in the industry believe that the 56-year-old Mr Friel - the man who put the finances together for Kerry's massive expansion in the past 15 years - is unlikely to stay much beyond five or six years, when one of the next generation of Kerry managers will move up and take the chief executive's job.

Mr Brosnan gave a clear indication that, in the latter half of this decade, this next generation will be taking over from the senior management team. There are no sure bets on who will be Kerry's chief executive in 10 years' time but if Current Account was a betting man he would be putting his money on Mr Stan McCarthy. Mr McCarthy (43), has run Kerry's ingredients business in North and South America for the past 10 years and was added to the main Kerry board a couple of years ago. Certainly one can expect some further additions to the board in the next few years from the ranks of the 30- and 40something young turks who are running the various arms of the group's business worldwide.

As regards the Kerry business, there is a general view that the task of meeting the target of minimum annual earnings growth of 15 per cent is going to be more difficult to achieve over the next few years. Big acquisitions, which have been the cornerstone of Kerry's expansion over the past decade, are increasingly difficult to find.

As Mr Brosnan put it this week, Kerry is now one of a group of international ingredients companies with sales of around $2.5 billion (#2.7 billion). Kerry will want to be the one of that group that will make the next step into the premier league, and that may come through a giant merger at some stage in the next couple of years rather than a straight acquisition. If a merger does prove to be the case, then Kerry will aim to be in shape to be the dominant part of the merged company.

In the meantime, it's difficult to justify Kerry's 20 per cent discount to peers such as Danisco and IFF and, on that basis, the shares should be a roaring buy. The only problem is that there are virtually no sellers of the shares and even unbundling part of the co-op's 37 per cent holding is unlikely to result in any appreciable improvement in liquidity.