"I noticed Madamswer commented on the Breville result earlier. Hopefully s/he will provide some comments here later today and point me in the right direction."
@desertredlion,
It's really very difficult for anyone to add any value by commenting on any single LYL result.
Reason being that problem with accounting for the Revenues and Profits of a company like LYL is that it has very lumpy revenues (by dint of it working on large projects, which are very material to Revenues), and these projects each start and end at different times.
This means there is a timing mismatch between LYL's business model and the conventional financial reporting timeframes (which, at 6-monthly intervals, are rather arbitrary, if you think about it).
Put another way, projects on which LYL work, don't conveniently start on 1 July of one each and end on 30 June the following year. If they did then LYL accountants could neatly match revenues and costs.
But because this is not what happens in reality, it means that LYL managers have to effectively make an estimate of how far projects are completed and, on that basis, book revenue proportionally. (It's not so much of an issue with expenses related to projects; they are observable as they are incurred)
Needless to say, accurately estimating accrual of revenue on a project is a highly imprecise matter, and is subject to all manner of subjective judgments. Hence, depending on their motivations (and, I daresay, their personal financial incentives), hypothetically two different management teams accounting for profits on the same project could come up with quite different Revenue bookings (and hence, profits) at the same project construction stage.
My long-made observations about the way LYL management approach this dilemma is that it is done by erring firmly on the side of conservate estimations [*].
The outworking of this is that for projects that straddle the end of a financial period (which they all do), at the period-end, LYL has booked to the P&L less Revenue (and hence, Profit) than has been actually accrued in reality. In other words' the P&L is held back.
Conversely, when projects complete, then there is an element of "catch-up" and Revenues bookings exceed accrued since the last financial period-end. In this case, the P&L receives a boost.
Of course, at any given time LYL would have several large projects both commencing and finishing, which would have the effect of naturally smoothing things out. But very often merely mobilising expenses and starting off one or two major projects would be enough to create the sorts of adverse profit distortions described above (and vice versa for large projects wrapping up in any given period, for example, JH2021 and JH2023, which were abnormally strong results).
So, really, to analyse a financial result for LYL for any 6 month period is a bit of a futile exercise and it would probably be more suitable to get a realistic view of LYL's underlying performance if the company's financial reporting cycle was once every two years, instead of 6-monthly. But of course, that's not the way the world of commerce and capital works, so we have to deal with 6-monthly results for LYL which are tantamount to little more than mere noise.
Which begs a question about why this is a publicly-listed company, to begin with.
Because LYL management certainly don't manage it for 6-monthly reports to the stock market. But that's a separate discussion.
[*] That's just one level of conservative accounting practice at LYL. The other is the deft art of provisioning for warranties. But again, that's a different discussion.
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(20min delay)