Dear Gerald, or 'Bitter minor shareholder of FFS.'
re: your message of Y/Day
Its a pretty much proven by now that the time honoured
practice of shooting the messanger has little effect on the
message itself.
If you dont like to hear the story about the China
International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC),
then at least have a look more close to home as a basis to
make a judgement on the forests deal.
I dont own FFS shares (I have my own little group of dogs
though, including mongrels like ITC), but my checking of the
FFS share price history shows that from about 1994 through to
now the FFS share price has gone from about $2.50 ($2.75 peak)
to about 0.22 now with 1 split. Thats a massive reduction in
value (its almost too much for my calculator to work out !!).
If it was the other way around - say from 50c to 250c, one
would say it was a 500% increase, so I guess the share price
has dropped 500%. Doesnt really matter about the accuracy of
the figure, the fact is that one could only conclude that the
board and management of FFS were - in politically correct
language - 'success challenged'. In normal day to day
language - hopeless. In language that your bank might
use when applying for a loan - unacceptable.
With a history like that one would have to conclude that
its a safe bet that any deal that the board was pushing was
most likely to cause a further reduction in share price. Thats
all thats happened in the past, so why any reason for change
now? They've even shown that in a deal with CITIC once
before that they couldnt make it work. As Tonto said
once when he found that his horse was deal - its time to get
off!!
It may just turn out that the 30% of shareholders who
said 'No' might be smarter than the board. Only time will
tell. (but I would lay bets)
Kind regards,
Bernard
Bourke
See IRG research reports
