Hi pb :) Flattered to be asked and I agree with Pioupiou on the...

Hi pb Flattered to be asked and I agree with Pioupiou on the importance of “modus cooperandii..”
As to the story - people will usually say they are not going to waste money.
..And we all know times were hard, and while they’re getting easier, the new season is slower than was expected .
Beyond this your comments about the quote “keeping it lean” possibly relating to shorter contracts fits in a Downer interview I read recently (I posted a link).. He (Gus?) said something about the era of the five year project being over; but in his context it was a bad thing for service companies .
Your view is the work is still there whether in small chunks or big ones.

Which is where the next few years will be interesting .
“Keeping it lean” in a different way ie ‘let’s cut costs to the bone’ was famously modeled by FMG and does not seem to have been good for contractors.
There’s no room in that attitude for modus cooperandii at all.

At our last AGM Jules said something about a big lesson learned from the Samsung betrayal was the importance if keeping the human ‘face to face’ element at the forefront of business dealings .
That face to face presence and the professionalism that accompanies it has been acclaimed frequently by Altura, by Gascoyne, and by Oz Minerals in recent times. Obviously it’s happening in Queensland too.

The lack of that attitude seems to be what lost international Fluor the Rio rail maintenance job recently .

There are more amalgamations and acquisitions all over ..and more automation and more specialising ...it’s the nature of things . But if the reason Fluor did “fall off the tracks “ was because through such things it all became too remote for genuine modus cooperandii then that bodes well for us - as long as we keep right on doing what we are doing right now
That’s my opinion anyhow.
Cheers