This company is a joke and the Directors and Senior Management...

This company is a joke and the Directors and Senior Management should be ashamed of themselves. I suppose if you keep telling yourself you are delivering good outcomes you soon start to believe yourself.

Revenue of $92m, up 19%. Simplification of the business, debt paid off but underlying PBT of literally zero in the midst of there self described large workloads and pipeline means there are margin problems. We are in an infrastructure boom afterall.

They either are not pricing the work high enough, they are not controlling costs (labour) or they are not delivering the work as per the project budget - I suspect the first two on much of their large construction work as it is hourly rate work. I suspect all three on any fixed price work.

Lucky they won the lottery when they sold Aquiris and they no longer need to go on ATO payment plans for their BAS payments. No wonder stuff-all cash is being returned to shareholders from the windfall as they will need it to continue the delusion that they actually have a plan to deliver profits.

Perhaps the management is so overpaid they want to continue with this orgy of grandoise expectations and business plan writing without delivering any return to shareholders apart from the token return of capital.

This business should have EBITDA of $15-20m in this reporting period. Go back and look at all the survey firm acquisitions they made and what they were each delivering and you will come up with greater than $20m on this level of revenue. The world has not changed that dramatically in 10 years. Other large survey firms (non listed) are making Net Profit before tax of 12-20% over the cycle, probably more in this boom.

Day to day my understanding it is traditional engineering surveying is Veris's cash cow yet they talk so fondly about their spatial offering - it must be burning through so much profit. It would be interesting to see segmented profits.. Maybe if they focused on making a profit today then they would have the resources to develop their offering of tomorrow.

I am close to declaring Veris will never make sustained year on year profits of any substantial nature whilst the folly of current Directors and Senior Management conitnue. These same parties continue to buy shares so to me that suggests they should go private. Hell they are worth more broken up on paper - they would be far more valuable as regionally based large players, but I suspect most of their staff would leave as it is the grandiose dream of a national player with shiny offices, new equipment and career pathways that has been sold to employees at the expense of delivering profits for their shareholders. Shareholders don't seem to matter to this company.

Disclosure - as previously mentioned I am in the spatial industry. I have been following Veris for 10 years and amazed at what they havent delivered yet how they distort the market at shareholders expense.