Ann: Expands International Direct Carrier Billing to Bahrain-MBE.AX, page-69

Longshot I love your enthusiasm don't get me wrong, but at some point you should probably temper it with a bit more realism. When they talk about it being low cost to set up overseas they are talking about start-up/establishment/staff costs only. The reality is that this is quite an expensive business to run due to the marketing dollars they need to sink into acquiring new customers - if you check the preliminary final report you will see what I mean (page 17, revenue $60.5m and advertising and marketing expenses $17.5m). That is why their ebitda margin is relatively low at circa 16%. That is also why the break even point for a new market can be 18 months or later after start up. Of course they are doing the right thing by chasing growth, but it's not that surprising that the market won't reward them until the results are seen. Having said that I was quite concerned to see international DCB revenue only having increased from $520K a month to $600K a month from Jan. to Oct. especially when Jan. and Feb. are normally their slowest months. That is a serious concern for me and it's not ideal that with the benefit of hindsight they seemed to attempt to hide this in the full year results release - monthly international DCB revenues weren't mentioned anyway. I couldn't care less about any of the other international markets except the UK (and the US of A in time) - this is the make or break. If they can't make very serious DCB revenue from that market pretty soon (in view of the favourable and highly comparable to Oz demographics) then I may need to reconsider whether MBE can really become the $1b market cap. stock that I'd previously thought it would be. Still holding though, it's in accumulation territory here I reckon....