Ann: Letter to Shareholders , page-24

"Net debt stands at $61mill, down $8.6mill from the March Quarter 2013"

Yes, Dex, that's true on a prima facie basis, but one needs to delve a bit deeper in order to discern the true delivering forces at play.

Specifically, there has been around $13m of non-operating cash outflows over the past 18 months ($9.8m to fund redundancy and restructuring, and $3.6m in relation to interest rate swaps that expired in February 2014) that need to be contemplated when looking at the rate of deleveraging.

Adjusting for this $13m-odd puts the fall in net debt at an annual run rate of around $22m which, for context, compares with an Enterprise Value of $128m.

By crude arithmetic, and assuming the current strategy of running the company for cash persists, that implies a EV-payback period of less than 6 years (compared to less than 4 years at the time I purchased the stock. So, still undervalued, if not egregiously so anymore.)

Put another way, at the current rate for deleveraging, sometime within the next twelve months, NIBD-to-EBITDA is likely to get close to a level of 1.5x (was 3.0x for FY13 and for FY14 looks like it will be around 2.2x).

I think that at a ratio of 1.5x, the banks start to take their foot off the company's throat and the board will be in a position for the resumption of dividend payments (bearing in mind the plus-$12m (~5cps) in franking credit.

And again, all of this makes no assumption of any upturn in COF's business cycle; rather that things remain as tough and challenging as they have been for the past two years.