Buying output and owning a producer are different undertakings, and the difference becomes visible only when a capability outlives the willingness of anyone to finance it. A government can specify what it wants, when it wants it and to what standard; it can lend against assets, guarantee a bank, restrict who may acquire a plant or reserve a veto over a change of control. None of those instruments settles who decides whether the activity continues at all, how the enterprise is capitalised, whether cash is reinvested rather than distributed, or whether losses of long duration are acceptable because continuity is worth more to the state than the return is worth to a shareholder. Those are the residual decisions of an owner, and they sit with whoever holds the equity. The United Kingdom has now twice taken them onto the public balance sheet — once in heavy forging and once in compound semiconductors — in circumstances where the private holder either could not fund the transformation required or no longer wished to. What that transfer actually buys, what it costs, and whether the industrial result could have been obtained by narrower means, is the question these two cases put and do not fully answer.