I agree: if they - after having today turned on the DRP - then declare a special dividend in six months' time, I'd make the effort to attend the next AGM to ask them what on earth they are playing at, and I'd strongly suggest that they should resign and make way for executives who understood the principles of capital management.
What is becoming increasingly clear - and it should not come as any surprise - is that the calls on capital, both in logistics as well as working capital, are increasing as the company invests "ahead of the curve" to build international scale.
For context, the early dis-economies of scale in setting up the fixed infrastructure to establish global capability can be seen in declining relationship between Operating Profits and Fixed Capital:
Of course, at some stage, these metrics will stabilise (to a certain degree, they have already), and will swing to a favourable trend, as the the sunk capital investment being undertaken in recent years starts to be leveraged into growing sales and profits.
And given that this is a +25% ROE business when it operates at steady state (~18% today due to aforementioned capital drag), its shareholders should be only too happy for its managers to be deploying growth capital on their behalf.
This was, once again, a very clean result from ARB (although NPAT margins in the Australian segment came under pressure, but I strongly suspect this is due to non-operating factors such as the expensing during the period of prior period taxation under-provision)
More than offsetting this was the excellent revenue and profit growth in the non-Australian geographies:
(20min delay)