Rab,I have been pondering on CCP and am hoping that you may be...

Rab,

I have been pondering on CCP and am hoping that you may be able to help resolve a dilemma. My issue is that I would like to know how much debt CCP collects from new easy to collect debt and how much it collects from older harder to collect debt. The reason is that if the company is predominantly taking the easy route then they are likely to appear productive in the short term but ultimately be saddled by a mountain of debt and if the take the hard they wili be much more stable and durable.

Let me explain by way of an analogy. Suppose my job is producing orange juice and to do this I order boxes of oranges, cut each orange in half and then squeeze these by hand. When I squeeze the halves the first drops of juice ooze out without much effort on my part, but if I want to get all of the juice out I will have to use a lot more effort.

If I am inherently lazy and want to appear highly productive while using the least amount of effort what I would do is to buy up cases of oranges, quickly give each a gentle squeeze and then move on to the next. This technique would enable me to produce an lot of juice without much effort. After whipping through the first batch of oranges I would borrow a bunch of investment money and buy more oranges, gently squeeze these, borrow and squeeze, borrow and squeeze, - you get the idea. At the end of the season I would have produced a lot of juice but be saddled with a mountain of debt.

On the other hand if I was a responsible and far sighted orange juice producer, I could buy up a the same boxes of oranges, and by taking a hard squeeze' approach generate almost as much juice but at the end of the season not have the same mountain of debt.

Taking the easy approach will increasingly make a company financially risky whereas the hard road will make it strong.

My dilemma is, is CCP in the hard working diligent every last drop hard road category or are they in the lazy spend and grow category and more importantly, are there any published numbers which can enable me to tell what is old debt collected and what is new?

K