a good read, page-37

G'Day Folks

To the answer the questions recently posed to me by Hotcopper members :-

In my opinion, Amanda and her senior management team are doing a much better job than Adrian and his team were doing. they have certainly made and implemented some very tough decisions.

In my opinion, Commander will not win the G8 contract back, however the new winner will not be announced for another six or seven months. The actual contract hand-over does not occur for another twelve months.

Commander are carrying a substantial amount of G8 assets on their Balance Sheet. It is my belief that those assets need to be immediately written off, when the G8 contract is lost. I would need to do further work to udnerstand what goodwill, if any, would need to be written off as well.

I am not seeing any new substantial wins for the Commander business and this was reflected in Amanda's last update. We will get a much clearer picture when the full year results are out, but clearly Amanda would be shouting from the tree tops if there were any recent wins of any magnitude.

I struggle to see how Commander can pay off the existing debt with the business structure they currently have. I struggle even more to see how they can pay off that debt without the G8 contract.

We know that there was no business interest in buying Commander six months ago, as Adrian tried to sell it before Amanda was introduced to the business. It is reasonable to assume that there is little to no interest in buying the re-structured Commander business, whilst it still carries the same large debt. So I do not see any white knight on the horizon, as some hotcopper members have suggested.

I do not wish to be overtly negative towards Commander, however we need to look at businesses objectively and currently there is little to be positive about with regards to Commander.

Astoria cannot continue to say that the turn-around is iminent based on an "improved management team". You can put the very best captain in charge of the Titanic, however the Titanic is still going to sink.

I will happily and gladly change my opinion on Commander, if anyone can give me some concrete reasons, on which to change my mind.

We also need to remind ourselves of the last auditors report, which clearly stated that Commander remains a going concern, only whilst Commander continues a sell down of assets.

Regards

Tails