Remember industrial holding companies - those investment dinosaurs which spread their interests between a variety of sectors mainly on the rationale that the diversity of their earnings base would cushion the companies against any downturn in one of their sectors.

Irish fund managers have less than happy memories of industrial holdings companies such as Fitzwilton and James Crean.

Younger readers who have seen Crean lurch from crisis to crisis in recent years might be blissfully unaware that not that long ago it was seen as an investment blue chip.

Now the emphasis is on companies with a specific focus. The Hanson empire has already been broken up, Fitzwilton is now owned by families that presumably are taking a more benign attitude than institutional investors.

And Crean has split itself in two, apparently in the belief that it makes sense to split an abysmal small company into two smaller units.

DCC has gone through a series of corporate changes in the past few years, moving from venture capital outfit to an industrial holding company and now to a distribution company.

At least, DCC has persuaded the FTSE people that it should be recategorised from a "diversified industrial" to a distribution company, a recategorisation that gives DCC access to analysts who cover the sector and puts DCC into a peer group that includes the likes of Lex Service, Lookers, Electrocomponents and Premier Farnell. The demise of the diversified industrials means there were hardly any analysts in that sector left to impress.

Still, Jim Flavin didn't seem too impressed this week when one reporter cheekily suggested that DCC is really a "diversified distributor" and not really similar to specialised distributors like Lex Service or Lookers.

The London market, however, liked the DCC results and pushed the shares ahead 4 per cent on the day of the results.