I have some questions about some of the 21 Feb statements and...

I have some questions about some of the 21 Feb statements and promises - for example:

- How does the most recently announced "Board and senior management change", that of switching the Chairman role, "support far-reaching initiatives", could this possibly be better explained and was it in the "prospectus" that buyers of the shares post 21 Feb bought into? Could there possibly be something even more worrying in the background to this that the market ought to know about?
- Could "more value in turning NL around rather than selling" possibly mean that no-one wanted to buy it after it had been hawked aorund a bit, so logically there must be a lot more wrong with it than just the envelope business? Could this possibly mean that NL is a bigger problem than the market is being told?
- Return to profit in FY14 - given the publicly announced slow pace of diversification and faster decline in revenues/margins as compared to restructuring savings, how long will it be before they could possibly need to admit that revenues are falling faster than they can compensate for by cutting costs or diversifying, and thereby have to back off the FY14 profit commitment (the change in rhetoric on this has already been picked up by the PIGS financial analyst).


However, for the reasons given below I wholly accept that I must be wrong in my views generally and in the queries raised above, viz:

There has been no market update since 21 Feb. If they were going off track in any material way and not achieving any of the promises, one assumes they would feel obliged to update the market. Ergo, the fact that they haven't must mean that everything is hunky dory.

Conversely, if they should suddenly issue some negative news about trading or prospects, the questions would come thick and fast, such as (hypothetically):

- How much diligence / verification was done to support the 21 Feb promises?
- When did they know (or ought to have known) that they were heading for another miss?
- Did they update the market in a timely manner (as soon as they knew)?
- Did they take proper advice, was this documented and did they act on it?

Just to emphasize - this is all purely hypothetical, because the fact that they are remaining silent proves without fear of contradiction that they must be exactly on track to achieve all of the promises.

So almost certainly, (IMHO, DYOR, etc) nothing at all for investors to worry about...