If one reads over some of the comments on this forum over the past 12 to 18 months, there were various opinions expressed by a range of poster that inferred a definitive step function change in the company and the way it goes to market.
What the company has been articulating to the market over the past two years is that there has been a significant investment in additional sales capability right across the organisation; including overhauls of management information systems, sourcing practices, manufacturing, supply chain management, marketing, customer segmentation, design...just about all aspects of the business were reviewed and re-tooled to make sure that the demand fro BRG's bespoke products that was seen to exist, could be serviced.
They said that they were setting the business up for accelerated growth, and this latest result provides yet more evidence of that substantial investment, that was made during 2015/6, now paying off.
Because when sales - in constant currency terms - of your core branded products increase by 14%, you know you are doing something very right.
Despite the exchange rate headwinds - which saw the A$ in JH2017 averaging ~5% higher than the US$ and >15% higher than the British pound compared to pcp - EBIT in JH2017 still rose by an impressive 8%.
With the international growth unlikely to slow any time soon, if the A$ were to do nothing for the next 12 months, I strongly suspect EBIT growth in FY2018 would end up being in the mid- to high-teen percentages.
All of that growth would be organic, and like the organic growth that saw net profit rise from $15m in Fy2007 to $54m today, it has all occurred without any recourse whatsoever to shareholders.
And, given the integrated, scaleable growth platform that they have put in place over the past 2 years, it looks to me like the next decade could easily see another trebling, or near-quadrupling, in earnings [*].
Verily, it is a thing of beauty.
(And kind of priced that way, unfortunately)
[*] To that end, to me the most telling part in today's presentation pack are the two small, somewhat obscure bullet points located roughly a little more than halfway down the page on Slide 16, and which are preceded by a box on the left hand side containing the text "Marketing/R&D".
Those two bullet points contain the defining corporate message that the spend on R&D and Marketing, which represented 9.5% of Net Sales in FY2017 (up from 8.5% in FT2016), was targeted to go to 12%.
They certainly aren't skimping when it comes to allocating resources for "good" costs.
Which is very much the way all self-respecting shareholders should want it.
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