It's interesting looking at the figures on this stock. In June...

It's interesting looking at the figures on this stock. In June '05 it had 78 cents worth of cranes and was renting them out for .15. The return on equity was 19. Not a bad little earner.
At that time, people were just starting to wake up to the fact that there was a mining boom and we were part of a super cycle the likes of which we may never see again in our life times.
So with a ROE of 19, growth in earnings and a brilliant outlook who would not want to put their money in this company. To all intensive purposes it looked like a growth company.
The company had only been around for two years then so people tended to think that is what the company was - a growth company. It probably never occured to them that it could be anything else but a growth company. The idea that it might be a cyclical company probably never occurred to a lot investors.
Anyway, management looked at the figures and thought there was a lot opportunity here to make more money, so they started to takeover other companies in the industry and buy more cranes.
Bookvalue consequently grew from 78 cents to $1.69. But then something happened; management started to employ a lot of islanders to manage the company and as everyone knows islanders are great fun at a party - singing dancing and eating lots of tucker - but they are useless when it comes to managing finances.
Also on top of that the demand for cranes declined as the engine for growth, USA hit a bump in the road.
So what happened then is that you had all these cranes sitting around idle and bunch of islanders running the show and of course this started to appear in the figures.
ROE went from 19 to 12 and growth went from 50% to 8% and the share price has almost halved from $4.70 to what it is today - $2.44
One positive out of all this is that maybe management has bought up every bloody crane on the continent and has cornered the market on cranes which means they can lift prices whenever they want and not be undercut by a competitor. But not sure on that.
There might be a crane out there that BOOM doesn't own and if there is we should bloody buy the thing quicksmart.
But having said all that what can we do?
Someone mentioned fire the muppets in charge. I agree that would be a good idea.
Also I would look into the islander situation. But as for the other we can't do much. I guess we were muppets buying the company in the first place and thinking it was a growth company when it was in actual fact a cyclical one.