You may be right - I hope you are as I am a holder of the business! I fully agree that FLT has a great culture with correctly incentivised workers. I also like the culture at management level, which emanates from a founder manager with skin in the game, a passion for the business and an eye to the long term. Here, the proper incentives of management, and especially Graham Turner, are paramount.
I guess form my simple perspective, the crucial competitive advantage of FLT in Australia derives from its scale. When I ask myself what does FLT have, that a competitor cannot readily re-create, the only answer I can think of with confidence, is scale.
The problem is that it does not have scale of this sort, or even close, in any of the foreign markets.
The other cultural stuff gives me confidence that this moat will not be diminished over time through ineptitude and inflated ego's (a la Woolworths). But you may well be right. Perhaps the stuff you mentioned is as key to its moat as is its scale - after all, I guess, FLT wasn't born with scale.
I just don't have sufficient confidence on this final aspect, so in my mind I need to be cautious.
Cheers, Mars
FLT Price at posting:
$35.29 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
