Ann: Trading Update, page-15

"Starting to smell like another run-of-the-mill kind of business?"

Well, depends on how you define "run-of-the-mill".

To my way of thinking, run-of-the-mill businesses don't endure: they either wither on the vine and die or they are forced to be reincarnated as something completely different.

SDI was never one of the market's beautiful companies, but one of its redeeming features is that it has been doing the same thing for something like four decades. And through all manner of business conditions, it as always been profitable, albeit that the profitability has been highly variable (as we are now seeing once again).

In just about every SDI result, there is some geography/product which was not firing; that's just the nature of the beast when you have long supply chains servicing many customers in multiple global geographies.

But today's update seems to point to more than just the usual one or two areas of business where things are not going to plan. There are a list of issues this time.

Whether this is something systemic or whether it is isolated, I'm not too sure. Given the tone and content of today's announcement - and especially in context with previous management utterances - I'm afraid to admit that I'm leaning to the former but my experience with these sorts of things is that I need to spend some time contemplating my navel in order to come to a firm view.

Either way, the share price is unlikely to do anything for at least the next 9 months, and - given management's pronouncements around "its-just-a-temporary-issue" - if the company comes in with a second-half profit of anything less than $3m (compared to JH2017's $3.6m), then even the most sympathetic followers of the company will be calling into question the extent to which the company's managers have their hands on the tiller.