david erringtom attacking wow rather than wes

Nice to see Merrill Lynch hatchetman David Erringtion and his unfailingly short-term outlook attacking WOW instead of WES, his favourite target!

From today's Business Spectator:

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WHAT DRIVES WOOLWORTHS

Merrill Lynch analyst David Errington has committed heresy. He’s questioned the model that has under-pinned and entrenched Woolworths’ dominance of food and liquor retailing over the past decade.

Errington, a sometimes idiosyncratic analyst with a good track record for making big calls on corporate strategies, believes that Woolworths is too focused on its customers and competitors at the expense of its shareholders and wants the group to halve its planned $2 billion of capital expenditures this year to improve its returns to shareholders.

"We are concerned that Woolworths is currently too focused on improving its underlying business from a customer standpoint and strategically disadvantaging its competitor – and not enough from its own shareholder standpoint," he wrote.

Asking Woolworths to take its foot off the neck of its major competitor and to allow Wesfarmers and the new Coles management breathing space within which to attempt their renovation of the Coles brands and offerings is to ask Luscombe and his team to completely reinvent their characters and convictions.

Woolworths is relentlessly competitive and aggressive and its capex program is all about ensuring that the bar Coles needs to meet in order to be competitive is continually moving away from Ian McLeod and his team. It is also aimed at weakening Wesfarmers’ ability to invest the massive amounts of capital required to reinvigorate Coles’ food and liquor businesses.
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Errington probably believes in the old words of John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, you're dead," but he rarely looks beyond the next quarter imho,