Ann: Profit Guidance, page-6

By the way (and apologies for not including this in my prior post), i think there's a risk your 2HFY17 forecast slightly underbakes the inbuilt seasonality of OCL because, like TNE, OCL historically generates the bulk of its profits in the second half of financial years. OCL's split of PBT between 1H and 2H since FY13 is as follows: 14%/86% (FY13), 34%/66% (FY14), 34%/66% (FY15), and 20%/80% (FY16). Obviously there are specific business circumstances driving the split in any given year (for example, the trend was particularly pronounced in FY16 because it was noted that customers were delaying upgrades in 1HFY16), but suffice to say the general trend is for a much heavier weighting of profits to 2H - if i simply add all 1H pre-tax profits since FY13 i get $6.0m, but doing the same for 2H i get $16.6m, so the aggregated split over the last four financial years is 27%/73%.

The counterbalancing point specific to FY17 might be the fact that OCL management had commented last year that 1HFY17 was expected to be particularly strong, due in part i suspect to the October launch of their ECM upgrade, which would suggest the FY17 split between 1H and 2H won't be as exaggerated as it has been over the last four years.

Playing pin the tail on next year's profit donkey isn't something i necessarily spend a whole lot of time doing, but if i were forced to guess in the case of OCL, i would go for something like a 40/60 split this year, which would translate to something like an EBIT of (4.8+7.2)=$12m, or NPAT of about $8.5m.