Some people hate the fact that Weetabix goes soggy in milk. But not Chinese food and retail group Bright Food, which yesterday agreed to buy a majority stake in the UK cereal group from private equity fund Lion Capital.

Details are sketchy, but Bright Food is buying 60 per cent of Weetabix and assuming its ￡900m of debt. Based on an enterprise value of ￡1.2bn, the Chinese buyer is forking out ￡1.1bn. That puts Weetabix on an EV multiple of 10 times trailing earnings before interest, tax depreciation and amortisation, the same as Kellogg and General Mills, which dominate the global cereal market. Granted, Bright Food is buying a high-margin business. Weetabix’s ebitda margin of 27 per cent is 9 percentage points more than Kellogg’s. But compared with the latter, the UK group makes only a handful of basic cereal products.

Nor is this a buyer-led turnround story. Weetabix’s management will stay put and Bright Food will add cereal to its portfolio of candy and milk. It will also try to sell Weetabix in China. Good luck. It might have 1.3bn mouths to feed, but there is little appetite for breakfast cereal. Even if some Chinese ditch rice porridge and soya milk and start the day with cereal, the market will grow only an average 7 per cent a year for the next five years to $244m, Euromonitor estimates – equivalent to just 2 per cent of the whole European market.