fresh look, page-2

I'm still to do a thorough review of the half yearly report. The difficulty is that the accounting standards requiring them to estimate past revenue/profitability based upon future events is ludicrous in the extreme.

Due to this the most reliable part of the financial accounts is the cashflow report.

On a positive note, in December SHV estimated the crop would be 75% above 2011. Based upon the estimate contained in the half yearly report SHV is on track for an increase of 81% on 2011.

The trouble with trying to do reliable comparisons with previous years, besides this stupid accounting standard, is that for a few years there SHV didn't do separate reporting of their owned and managed orchards, instead chosing to lump them all together and when they did previously account for them separately SHV owned substantially less orchards than they do now making it hard to make estimates due to lack of accurate figures taking into account the economies of scale.

A positive is that pre-TIM the company was profitable even with less than 2,000 acres and the Defender business (which had an EBIT of just under $1m).

SHV now has a lot more acreage (although it is a lot more spread out thus adding costs) and a food products business with EBIT at least triple that of the old Defender business (thus more than making up for the additional corporate costs).