New products in FY2017, page-2

@travelightor,

Despite having no interest in cars myself (other than as a means getting there and back), even I can see how people, who are motor enthusiasts, would consider this sort of stuff to be cool.

Putting forward a brickbat to balance all the bouquets, the one concern I have is that ARB falls victim to scale dis-economies from the need to manage more and more SKU's.

As it is, in recent years the investment in Working Capital has been rising at a disproportionately faster rate than Sales.

Average Working Capital-to-Sales
2010: 19.8%
2011: 20.5%
2012: 21.7%
2013: 23.3%
2014: 25.7%
2015: 27.2%
2016: 29.0%

In $ terms, that represents a $57m investment in additional working capital over the past 6 years ($47m of that figure being attributed to higher inventories).

And int the context of annual operating cash flows of circa $45m, this working capital build is clearly a not-insubstantial affair.

Of course, the positive position on this trend might be that it reflects the need to fill company's international distribution pipeline.

That is sure to be the cast to some extent, but given this rising Inventory-to-Sales pattern has been in train over a protracted period of time, it can't all be explained by geographical expansion: increasingly, I suspect its a result of slow-moving SKU's.

It's not too big a drama in the scheme of things, but it is something that I have been watching with increasingly-raised eyebrow at each of the last few result announcements.