Ann: Substantial Product Holder Notice - Perpetual Limited, page-2

Clearly soembody thinks the rot has been stopped and FBU is on the rebound.

Interesting to note Boral also Australasia focus diversified building supplies distributor has just disclosed a significant profit down grade which notes reason as being delay of infrastructure projects.  Can help but wonder about house and appartments starts in Australia affect both Boral and FBU.

However FBU have plenty of work to get on with finishing in NZ and the housing and apartment markets still have a 18 months to run at current levels before the tide starts to turn so they have every chance of a make some money.  They also have the chance of further non core off loads to stream line the business an risk exposures.

The key question is have the finally faced up to fully resoursing management of contractual risk management which they failed to do on their last construction venture in Australia in the 1990s and failed to fix in NZ when they restructured construction back to just NZ.  Its been the sleeping elephant in the room since then and came home to roust in the last cupple of years. It's a shame they didn't fix this after their lessons in Australia given it took 15 years to sort that mess out.  Hopefully this has finally been done and the company will be a lot stronger for it.  Heres hoping.  May be the disaster of Adamson causing over a 1000 years of senior management experience to walk out the door in a tight labour market with a full book o work (madness), will have a silver lining if the result has been a fix to the core issue.

FBU faces many challenges but they still have market shares in many channels which they still retain leading market share scale economies and if they can ditch their radom loss making construction projects habbits of the last 10 years, they can still be a power house of earnings with the current infrastructure and accomodation needs across Australasia.  In the balance I'm a beleiver in FBU as a good recovering stock and it's nice to see one of the heavy hitters backing the same sentiment.  AIMHO. DYOR.