Ann: Half Yearly Report and Accounts, page-4

@travelightor,

I'm a bit surprised you feel so strongly about an issue which - in the scheme of things - appears to me to be a bit trivial in terms of the amount of shareholder capital-at-risk (being less than 1% of Total Assets).

I was a shareholder in ONT for a number of years, but sold my shares some time back after the company reported a series of financial result from which it could be deduced that organic earnings were contracting.

The issue for me has been, and continues to be, more about what the underlying business is actually doing, rather than management's utterances (with their potential for passionate embellishment) of what it is doing.

And this latest result is, to my way of thinking, one of the ONT's better results of the past two or three years, where growth in assets has been matched with growth in Operating Profits.

Until now, I was unsure if the company's sluggish earnings trajectory over the past few years was a mere temporary cyclical phenomenon, or something more sinister.

This result goes some way to arguing it is the former.

If that is indeed the case, and there is indeed a cyclical increase in demand for ONT's services, then I think the $8m that the company has spent on acquisitions during the "lean" times (when vendor expectations were presumably muted) will prove to be far more relevant in terms of shareholder value creation, than a $0.4m disengagement from a venture in which ONT held a mere minority stake.