I might be way off track here. I always had the impression that...

I might be way off track here. I always had the impression that the secret sauce with FLT is in operations, specifically on how their sales teams are organised and incentivised. They tap into basic psychological factors, which appears to be invariant across cultures and nationalities.

The consequence of such a reward structure is that over time, the Pareto Principle starts to come into play ie top 20% makes 80%. The advantage of scale for FLT becomes increasingly important because the smaller independent outfits cannot afford the churn and burn, and has insufficient inventory to support the trajectory of the main breadwinners.

That is why I am increasingly confident that the overseas operations, especially UK and USA, then Middle East, Hong Kong/PRC, Singapore, will follow a similar trajectory as Australia. Note that in 2004, FLT's EBIT/TTV for operations predominantly in Australia was just a tad over 1%, compared to 3% at present. In 2015, FLT's EBIT/TTV for the rest of the world was sitting at a measly 1.3%.

As to WEB, I note that flights TTV from half to half remained unchanged at $433m. This is also surprising given that the current environment is one in which WEB should be thriving. The hypothesis that WEB and online is eating FLT's business model does not appear to be supported by hard evidence.