Mmm. When it comes to earnings predictability, this will always...

Mmm.

When it comes to earnings predictability, this will always be a bit of a "gunnah" company, I'm afraid, given all the extraneous factors at play at any given time.

So little wonder no one can get it right (even the company's own internal budgeting process).

But I think some context is required around today's announcement, and that is that the company makes less than 20% of its profits in the December half, and then at very skinny profit margins (averaging 2.3% over the past four Dec half-years, and ranging between 0.2% and 4.1%)

This means, due to the law of small numbers, that a small variance at the Revenue line translates into a large variance at the bottom line.  Which is what happened here.

So ordinarily I would not get overly animated about this sort of "miss" - given the sheer nature of the business and the drivers of its earnings, as well as the arithmetic oddities of highly seasonal earnings.

However, even with my approach to investing that has a distinct philosophical preference for assessing Free Cash Flow earnings spanning several reporting periods (as opposed to the level of Accounting Profit in any single financial period), it is quite bemusing that this company did not perform better in the past half-year given the distinctive tailwinds the business should have been enjoying.

The Australian segment must be doing it really, really tough to be negating the observable positive factors.