How will the latest gov stimus help FLT, page-6

I'm wondering just how much net financial relief it will actually provide a company like FLT, given the workers that the payment is designed to protect would have been stood-down by the company whereby the payroll liability would have been reduced accordingly*. The real short-term beneficiaries are (quite rightly) the AU workers (and UK workers, per the UK's initiative), but (in very broad terms) the additional financial wage support received from the AU Fed Govt simply acts to offset the additional payroll costs incurred by keeping workers on that would have otherwise been stood down. On that front it's hard to argue (imo) that there is any net financial benefit for FLT. In more broad terms of business continuity it operates as a positive for the company, as it should.

(*I know there's an short-term argument to be made that not all of the AU workers were previously announced to be stood-down, meaning there was already an ongoing staff cost cash burn for those remaining. However, my view is that without swift Fed Govt support, many, many more AU stand-downs would have occurred in order to manage the AU labour cost cash burn. It's in that context that my above comments were made.)

The real key for me is just how much of the fixed costs (eg: AU & int'l leases and int'l labour costs) that can be stripped out through rental holidays (and int'l staff stand-downs, subject to relevant IR laws) during this disruption. Having the AU Fed Govt and the banks singing from the same song sheet wrt AU leases is very good, as it will apply pressure to AU landlords. FLT is, however, very much an international operation with a large and diverse physical international footprint. I think the larger question is how quickly the labour and rent costs can be reduced in those international jurisdictions, as mentioned in the OP.

Today's announcement should go some way to helping remove some aspects of uncertainty, which should help placate potential lenders and new equity investors, but there's still a lot more work to do, imo, wrt getting clarity around the (local and int'l) rent question and also the int'l staffing costs. That's why, imo, the suspension continues...