how good is lend lease

$1 billion in cash at the bottom of the cycle

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PHILIP WILLIAMS: How do you then turn a quid in these bad times, or do you just have to accept that you're not going to make money over the next couple of years?

GREG CLARKE: Well we kept our powder dry and we've got about nearly $1 billion in the bank, we didn't buy a lot of assets at the inflated assets at the top of the boom, so we're now roaming the world looking for opportunities to invest, we've got a great pipeline of work in the UK. Most of it's long-dated from 2012 through to 2020, so we think we're well positioned in the UK and we're now looking for other opportunities.

I've just been in the Gulf in the Middle East, I'm in the USA next week and we're looking for opportunities to grow our business because we have money to do it.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: In a sense, are you in a position, one of those rare people in a position to actually take advantage of the downturn?

GREG CLARKE: This is a time of great opportunity for Lend Lease. We took some abuse from the market for not gearing up to the same level as many of our competitors, so we have very low levels of borrowing, so now we can invest at prices that are 25 per cent of what they were maybe a year ago.

PHILIP WILLAMS: Did you get, were you criticised at the time for putting money aside and for not gearing as highly as you possibly could?

GREG CLARKE: Yeah we received quite a lot of abuse from some of the analysts in the marketplace on the basis that we weren't driving our return on equity as high as some of our competitors because our levels of borrowings were too low. Now our job is to make decisions for the long-term, but there was some short-term pain associated with that and our profits could have been higher, historically, but we decided that property was a cyclical business, we should return good returns over the long-term rather than short-term, and to do what required us to sit on the money at the top of the market and invest it at the bottom of the market, and that's what we're doing now.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2372192.htm