It might work out for you and make you money. I have no intent...

It might work out for you and make you money. I have no intent to short anything.

I just speak as someone who's seen the transition of various Service companies into Ventia a few years ago, and then BRS into Ventia. The state of BRS and Ventia and how they have been run has been to offload them - not to build a well organised long-term business.

The services sector is a headache for all involved and one mistake (i.e failure during tendering to identify the true cost to maintain the assets involved) means disaster for these long term contracts that already have low margin built in. Please believe me when I say, the example I gave is a HUGE problem for this business. RE outsourcing of asset maintenance to third parties - the pendulum can also swing in the opposite direction and the utility / asset owners can just hire their own teams to manage the assets and bring it back in house.

Ultimately the things i've mentioned is the reason that Downer, Lendlease, Spotless, Ferrovial etc are all desperate to get out of the services business.

Even if Ventia wanted to scale and could dig up the capital to integrate all the Services arms of these companies, it would take 5-10 years to integrate them. The commercial agreements alone would be very different and aligning them all its impossible without tens of millions of dollars and time. The types of maintenance between water, roads, electrical, nbn are all very different and the divisions are essentially separate companies with their own overheads etc. Ventia would/does struggle to compete with other service providers who specialise in a specific domain (eg comdain for water) and I see them losing any major contracts to these industry specific companies and then are stuck with Tier 2 asset contracts.

There are some cool and innovative bits of the business like remediation and visionstream, but I feel they are dragged down by Transport, I&I and defence.

Anyway, hope this gives you another perspective not in the brochure.