Ann: Trading Update, page-9

"Having said all of that, I think this company, for me anyhow, is more about the next several years rather than the immediate reporting period."

That is the correct take on the stock and its investment merits, I believe.

The problem with the next several years for the company is that it will coincide with a major capital project which is budgeted to be funded by internal resources as well as the assumption of a large slug of debt, to the extent that Net Debt-to-EBITDA will likely hit well over 3 times at stages. So there is very little wiggle room for things to go wrong.

No reflection on the merits of the decision to proceed with said project; it had to happen. They have left it at late as they possibly could have because they are bursting at the seams at the existing site.

However, I had hoped, by the time the commitment to the major undertaking was made, that the company would be better capitalised, but with the stock having been continuously valued cheaply for several years, equity capital has always been too expensive (especially for the founding family members who are highly sensitised to being diluted).

So that leaves us where we are today; a nice little business with a long operating history, but which is today embarking on a mammoth undertaking (with a price tag far bigger than I had expected, and I suspect I'm not alone in having been surprised by it), all internally funded.

It is hard to envisage the stock doing any outperforming until the market gets a sense that the project has reached the stage of being largely de-risked, which is some time away.

And until then, I think capital invested in the stock is likely to be dead money.