Ann: Quarterly Activities/Appendix 4C Cash Flow Report, page-68

The very nature of businesses, especially early stage ventures, is that they get exposed to lots of opportunities that for whatever reason do not eventuate. Most of the time for reasons beyond managements control.

As an example, KDY recently onboarded a new CEO. Keen to make his mark he pushed a major change in strategy through that saw the company abandon its DTC operations to reduce expenses and simplify operations. Undoubtedly this had a massive impact on a number of Kaddy's suppliers who had invested heavily to cater for Kaddy's high growth rates and service level demand. You could easily understand how the management of those companies didn't see the $5.7m in lost contracts coming.

Now lets just say (hypothetically of course) that one of the largest family multi-generational owned wine producers in the country signed up to Wine Depot (now Kaddy), completed the onboarding process, integrated their IT systems, trained their staff and even started moving inventory into Kaddy's depots but just when things are about to be launched and announced via a joint press release, there's a change in leadership at that business and the project temporarily gets put on hold. Then after months and months of other false starts, their priorities change and the project eventually gets scrapped. You could easily understand how management (of both businesses) didn't see that coming.

Now these are a couple of examples of the opportunities (and threats) that a business like Kaddy would have to deal with every single day. There's likely to be hundreds more that investors will never know about. Transformational acquisitions that could have propelled the company into immediate double digit profitability. Storage and distribution contracts for multinational brands that would quadruple the warehousing footprint required by the company....

Yes, perhaps the former CEO got a little too excited and indicated the potential for good news prematurely - but to accuse them of lying or misleading investors is simply unfair. Especially during a period when there was a constant flow of good news being released. Trying to claim that it was part of some greater conspiracy involving contributors here is simply absurd.

In any case, there was very little movement in the share price around those investor updates as most people took it for what it was. If there was any material news, then it would have been shared via a formal ASX announcement.