Snap! I was part-way through doing something along similar lines...

Snap! I was part-way through doing something along similar lines myself. We'll run with yours.

Firstly, from my reading, I don't believe notice is required to be given for stand-downs. There can be exceptions, but the default is generally no paid notice period required to stand down. When we think about the reasons that underpin the ability to quickly stand down a workforce, having a long paid notice period is at odds with that idea. For the sake of this back-of-envelope modelling, let's work on the basis that it's not relevant here.

This means Scenario #1 is a ~$34m JobKeeper benefit to FLT per the assumptions you have provided. I agree that it's fair to assume some degree of accrued AL drawdown, but I'd contend that 2 weeks available AL averaged across all affected staff is probably on the high side. I know there will be a mix/range of balances, but I would be more conservative and use an average of 1 week across the entire workforce. That would put the benefit to FLT under this scenario at ~$28m. If we split the difference and adopted 1½ week AL drawdown across the board, that increases the benefit to ~$31m.

If we also accelerate the pattern of stand-downs, then those govt benefit numbers to FLT will reduce a bit more, but I won't bother getting into that level of detail because I understand and agree with the broader point that you are making.

I short: no argument from me that any of the above numbers are 'neutral' benefits per se. Every bit helps and those benefit dollars received during the wind-down are better in FLT's bank accounts than not.

My larger point about 'benefit neutrality' related to the bigger/ongoing picture, after the short-term wind-down period when the majority of the AU workforce had been stood down. I previously mentioned that there would likely be some short-term benefit received until all but a skeleton staff are actually stood down, which (for me) is where that $30m-odd potential benefit sits.

Cheers,
Z

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The following is a rough AU-NZ head count that I have tentatively come up with. I was drafting a reply to your earlier staffing question before I saw your scenario post. It's still a bit rough and ready and I figure it's probably redundant now, but rather than toss it I thought I'd simply paste it here, in case is anyone finds it useful:

The Feb, 2020 (H1) investor preso mentions 8,334 selling staff across Australia-NZ (p.18). That's in the context of overall global selling staff of 14,682 (p.62).

However, the 2019 Annual Report cites overall staff numbers of 20,000 (specifically, 19,993) (p.86). In Skroo's interview with Fran Kelly on RN he mentions "22,000 ppl in 23 countries", but he doesn't mention whether they are all staff (as opposed to contractors, etc...).

Let's stay with global staffing of 20,000. Presumably the difference between 20,000 global staff in June 2019 and ~14,700 sales staff in Dec 2019 (5,300 staffers) relates to non-sales-related global back-office and head office staff. Just how many of those are in Australia, I don't know. (There may be more granularity to this that I haven't seen from a cursory scan of the 2019 Annual Report, but I haven't picked it apart to that level at this stage.)

So, Total AU Staff =
~8,300 sales staff in AU-NZ
less, say, 1,000 NZ sales staff estimate (i.e. using TTVs as a staffing proxy - NZ TTV is roughly 12% of AU).
plus ?xxx? back-office/head office AU staff from a global pool of ~5,300.

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