News: AMA AMA Group acquires of a further seven vehicle repair centres, page-13

* My comment on revenue growing at inflation was based on stripping out the impact of acquisitions to get an idea of how the underlying business is performing. You have to do quite a bit of work to strip out the M&A impacts (both buying and selling of businesses) to see. This industry is barely growing and innovations in car technology is reducing the incidence of accidents as time progresses

* I didn't say focusing on opex is a bad thing - just that the bigger impact would be felt if they focused on improving GM% - which is harder to do than opex savings by cutting out redundant admin costs which is low hanging fruit

* There were only four major players in this industry, after AMA acquired Gemini there are three. One remaining large business is owned by Suncorp. I doubt Suncorp would sell it as having a smash repair business provides a competitive advantage in pricing car insurance (as the repairs GM$ stays within Suncorp when a customer makes a claim) - not a bad thing to have when it is hard to generate returns on your insurance business free float with ultra low interest rates.

* Are AMA really setting up greenfield sites in new locations - or simply amalgamating several sites from various recent acquisition to a central sites in the same locations?

* This year's results get a $30m free kick as it includes 3 months of revenue from the Gemini acquisition which were not included in FY16 due to the timing of the purchase. Management talks up 'growth' in their presentations but this is largely the result of acquired earnings, and timing impacts of the acquisitions, rather than organically improving earnings (especially after the businesses are acquired).

My over-arching concern is that this business is currently being priced in the market on a high EBITDA multiple when earnings growth is coming from rolling-up other players in a mature industry displaying marginal revenue growth. Management seems to be doing little about growing earnings after acquisition except for doing the obvious (i.e. removing duplicated opex). A focus on improving GM% (e.g. by increasing the use of non-genuine parts like is done in the US and Canadian industries) might better justify its current earnings multiple.