SHV, page-4

You make some good points there.

Personally, at this point in time I am a little bit hesitant to place too much blame on the management for the poor share price performance of the company over the past year.

What isn't entirely clear is the extent to which the under performance this year is simply down to bad luck.

By my assessment, there were at least three uncontrollable events this year that may have weighed on the share price:

1. The biggest contributor to the poor result last financial year was the disappointing crop, which seems to have resulted from some freak weather late last year.

True, the crop forecast at the start of the year was overly optimistic. But the eventual crop ended up weighing in significantly lower than even a conservative estimate, and there are only so many measures that can be implemented to mitigate the impact of freak weather events.

2. There was also the recent announcement regarding Ross Herron. Possibly he may have been in poor health for some time. At any cost, over the past 12 months or so there seems to have been some sort of instability in the top tier management. If one of the directors was in poor health it may have made it more difficult for the management to stay on top of everything in what proved to be a chaotic year, although at this point we don't really know the full story.

3. Finally, I suspect the imposition of the GST in India on July 1 may have made it very difficult for Select to sell a large chunk of their crop. You would expect that the GST increase would have been passed on to Indian almond buyers, and it basically resulted in a one off surge in the Indian almond price, adversely impacting demand for the nut, and making it all the more difficult for the company to find buyers for the remainder of their crop.

Incidentally, in the Annual Report announcement last month, there was a comment (pg 10) that they still had not sold 28% of their crop, and I wonder if they are going to be able to find a buyer now that the Californian crop has hit the market. I suspect this may have been the real reason behind the recent capital raising: the company might suspect that they will end up writing off much of their unsold crop.

At any cost, the implementation of the GST in India is another factor that was beyond the control of the management.

I suspect Select Harvests is a more difficult company to run than most listed ASX companies, and so I tend to give the management the benefit of the doubt. While time will provide more clarity, it is possible that the poor share price performance this year may simply have been the result of a chain of unfortunate events.