anyone else looked at the results? In brief, still...

anyone else looked at the results? In brief, still under-delivering IMHO.

the good: Revenues were up 10% (up 9% organically). 11% growth in active surgeons (with more to come from Oceania acqn), and 11 major product launches in 2017. So presumably there is a full year impact of both of those gains in FY18 (as well as Oceania acqn).

But margins declined again. This was blamed in part on FX movements but the pattern of LHC achieving reasonable/good revenue growth but being unable to grow EBIT/NPAT is a familiar one for LHC. Working capital was up again (but not increasing as fast as sales growth), and mgmt. suggest the current working capital proportion of revenues is in line with management expectations. (that's probably right, but there is a big investment in WC, do they want to improve return on investment or not?)

I also have a bit of a problem with LHC's claim that underlying eps grew 1%. In that calculation LHC exclude transaction costs (among other things). The largest component in FY17 transaction costs is that the MVA acquisition cost has increased because MVA outperformed. So they include the outperformance of MVA in the normalised results, but exclude the cost of it (higher purchase price). so, I think they're overstating FY17 performance. (That said, in FY18 hopefully MVA can sustain or further improve performance, and the purchase price costs obviously won't repeat.)

Finally, they issued a chunk more options, with easier performance targets. Ie, on the latest options tranche the compound annual growth in earnings per share target is only 7% growth to get all options vested - it used to require 11% growth.

I like the niche of LHC and some aspects of the business, and based on benefits of the some of the above FY18 is shaping up ok (but they still forecast only "high single to low double digit growth in revenue, EBITDA, eps" - which they haven't achieved in recent years!), but there are still pieces of the investing picture which are still missing, and I can't being myself to invest.!

GLAH