Fairline - any news?

Deleted User said:
Very unfair
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Agreed, if extrapolated out of its context, as you did. It wasn't a comparison, in my original post - that's not the way I meant it, anyway.

That aside, re. chunking "£34m according to last weekend's profile of John Moulton in the Sunday Times" and getting close to nothing in return, so what?
After all, "He seemed to shrug it off on a win some/lose some basis" - both bracketed sentences taken from your post #285.

There's a reason why they call it entrepreneurial risk rather than workers (or employees/suppliers/whatever) risk, I reckon... :)
 
jfm said:
No not at all. There is sometimes too much presumption of wrong doing around here! The charge was indeed put in place as an integral part of the BC-->WB sale but that doesn't make it wrong. If the lender had outstanding demand loans a charge is perfectly lawful and anyway some of the secured loan was I'd guess either lent upon the sale (to give a wording capital pot) or might have been lent afterwards to fund boats in build. It really doesn't scream of bad behaviour.
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Hang on a minute, it rather seems to me that there's too much presumption of presumption of wrong doing.

I kinda understand Deleted User objection to my post where I mentioned Nigerian scammers, but how does my comment on clawback action qualify as presumption of wrong doing?!?
First of all, it was a question - and if you say that the answer is no, I take your word for it, but I can assure you that in IT (and I believe also in DE, FR and ES - though I'm not positive on that) the answer would be yes for good. And going backwards up to 24 months btw, not just the day before or whatever.
But that aside, of course there's nothing wrong with the charge ex-ante. It's the subsequent bankruptcy that could (but remember, I was asking!) make it clawback sensitive. And even if it were, that doesn't necessarily make the ex-ante transaction "wrong".

All that said, I suppose you could have rather accused me of wrong doing presumption based on my post #438, where I envisaged that the whole show is actually a plan discussed and agreed in advance during a lunch at the Angler or wherever (as opposed to publicly disclosed, anyway) between BC and WB.
In this respect, guilty as charged, your honour. But I have a funny feeling of being far from alone in having drawn such conclusion... :ambivalence:
 
Timetosail! said:
Efficiencies are important, but they don't mean squat if customers don't want your products.
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Agreed, but the reverse is also true.... A very desirable product is important but it doesn't mean squat if you can't deliver it in acceptable quality for an acceptable price...... market acceptance is always a mulit-dimensional issue. I think the case of Porsche in the decades before 1992-1993 is interesting to study. No disagreement their product was desirable, indeed already an icon..... but complete efficiency and quality rot was killing off any hope of profitability, threatening the very survival of Porsche. Hard to believe today that it is not even 25 years ago Porsche was staring into the abyss, while now Porsche is top of the league in regards to quality, desirability..... and profitability.

Efficiency is a matter of willingness; where you produce is largely irrelevant. Germany is not a cheap country for manufacturing, yet Bavaria and Hanse turn out ~1500 boats annually between them of surprisingly good quality and very keenly priced...... and they make money - granted, very little at the moment, but just enough to survive and invest in a (hoped for) more profitable future. The same can be said about BenJen, who are disadvantaged by rigid labor regulations and high taxes; still they have persistently invested in maximum manufacturing efficiency, which has made them leaders in many segments of the market. In recent years they have begun to invest in innovation too; I don't think they quite hit it right design wise, but that just makes it more dangerous for everyone else, because imagine one day they may hit it right on almost all parameters and then they become virtually invincible. I for one do not believe in hidden subsidies being even a partial explanation of their success..... at best any hidden subsidies (difficult with EU always keen to clamp down on such) would only compensate a little for the disadvantage of a rigid and regulated labor market.

The inverse is true for what used to be known as the 4 big British builders.... none of them have ever shown anything but superficial interest in efficiency or productivity issues. Two are already down, the two others are losing money (AFAIK). Having the most desirable product - even if it was universally the case - is very far from enough.

I believe it is a self-defeating attitude to say..... oh well, we are producing in the UK, so competing on price is out of the question..... we will not even try. You gotta try, because at the end of the day you are always competing with someone else, who will eventually - some day; if not already today - offer an equally desirable product for slightly less money.
.
 
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Deleted User said:
Which country has had the more vibrant and growing economy during the last few years, indeed during the last couple of decades? Its not France so I wouldn't hold up France's state managed economy as a beacon of how to run an economy although I agree that their train set is better than ours;)
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by vibrant economy assume you mean the loss on being incharge of
our water.
our waste
our power generation
our car industry
our aircraft industry
our railway rolling stock
our electronics industry
err ....run out of stuff :)
Well at last we can rely on our financial peeps in the city to look after our interests......:)

our ability to construct ......err ......well anything really
 
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Hugin - I wasn't saying that you should just give in and accept inefficiencies and feed them to the market in the price-tag. Far from it. All of British industry has to be efficient and competitive to compete on a world stage.

However, product life-cycles in the boat business are very short these days. Just look at how quickly the Fairline 48s volume faded away after launch. Just because a model has sat on the price list for 7 or 8 years doesn't mean that it has been selling - but it does help to shore up resale values.

If manufacturers don't bring innovation in both spec and design to the market regularly, the range quickly goes stale. With excess capacity chasing declining volume, firms spend more and more to maintain what they see as their slice of the cake, burning cash and working harder and harder for marginal gain.

Add to that the expectations of the financial superheroes of the PE world who want to see a rapid turnaround and stellar growth from their investment, but from a shrinking market. Dealers that have the cash or the funding line then get tucked up with stock as one of the quick sources of cash and the market gets constipation.
 
oldgit said:
by vibrant economy assume you mean the loss on being incharge of
.
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I'm not going to drift this thread by getting into an economic discussion on this point only to ask this. If the French way of running their economy is so brilliant, why are there 400,000 French people currently living and working in London alone? You can have a rigid sclerotic economy like the French or a flexible open economy like ours but the price of having that flexible open economy is that foreigners come in and buy stuff. Personally I don't care who owns our water or electricity companies so long as they provide me a reliable supply of water and electricity at a fair price
 
Deleted User said:
I'm not going to drift this thread by getting into an economic discussion on this point only to ask this. If the French way of running their economy is so brilliant, why are there 400,000 French people currently living and working in London alone? You can have a rigid sclerotic economy like the French or a flexible open economy like ours but the price of having that flexible open economy is that foreigners come in and buy stuff. Personally I don't care who owns our water or electricity companies so long as they provide me a reliable supply of water and electricity at a fair price
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ahem .. and why is it that there are 3 times as many Brits living in France as French in the UK ? ( I also dispute your 400,00 'living') . I also don't want to distract the thread -- do I get the last word? ;)
 
EME said:
ahem .. and why is it that there are 3 times as many Brits living in France as French in the UK ? ( I also dispute your 400,00 'living') . I also don't want to distract the thread -- do I get the last word? ;)
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Er most of them have retired there for the good life! I'm not disputing the fact that France has its many attractions but creating wealth and keeping it out of the hands of the French taxman isn't one of them;)
 
Deleted User said:
I'm not going to drift this thread by getting into an economic discussion on this point only to ask this. If the French way of running their economy is so brilliant, why are there 400,000 French people currently living and working in London alone? You can have a rigid sclerotic economy like the French or a flexible open economy like ours but the price of having that flexible open economy is that foreigners come in and buy stuff. Personally I don't care who owns our water or electricity companies so long as they provide me a reliable supply of water and electricity at a fair price
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As I understand it, there are more French in London alone, than Brits in the whole of France. Can't remember where I read it though.

If you fancy trying the Lifestyle, see my ad below:rolleyes:
 
oldgit said:
by vibrant economy assume you mean the loss on being incharge of
our water.
our waste
our power generation
our car industry
our aircraft industry
our railway rolling stock
our electronics industry
err ....run out of stuff :)
Well at last we can rely on our financial peeps in the city to look after our interests......:)

our ability to construct ......err ......well anything really
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oldgit I don't want to go off at big tangent but it's worth considering that inward investment into UK is a very good thing. We're a small island without Abu Dhabi oil reserves in our back gardens so we need a stack of capital invested in our economy and due to some clever work we have lots of that. For example we are iirc 2nd biggest car maker in Europe and I'd suggest to you that the fact the ultimate shareholders are Indian and Japanese ( which actually isn't the case if you look through to the their shareholder registers) is neither here nor there. We've got the factories and that's the biggest prize. Being in charge counts for little anyway, no worries, just saying
 
henryf said:
... it was probably going large that saved the others.
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I wish that were true but while you could say sseeker are saved, princess aren't. I wish them total good fortune and continuation of 2000 folks making delightful boats in UK but right now they ain't saved. If you look at their summer 2015 refi docs at companies house you can predict now there will be interesting comments when the publish 2015 accounts (which is far off into the future of course). They need to restructure and get out of the hole we're describing here in the context off fairline being in it.
 
jfm said:
I wish that were true but while you could say sseeker are saved, princess aren't. I wish them total good fortune and continuation of 2000 folks making delightful boats in UK but right now they ain't saved. If you look at their summer 2015 refi docs at companies house you can predict now there will be interesting comments when the publish 2015 accounts (which is far off into the future of course). They need to restructure and get out of the hole we're describing here in the context off fairline being in it.
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But do you think building 30-40m boats is the problem or, as I suggested earlier having 30 different models each with their associated R&D costs, lack of ability to ramp up production etc and relatively minor differences between models. They are at it with the big stuff as well. 30m, 35m, 40m. Further down the range having 2 or 3 feet between models seems madness to me. Far better a few spaced out platforms onto which you can change layouts easily.

Henry :)
 
Non of the British builders seems saved by going bigger. Two went bust; two is sort of living the life of SAAB automobile, destroying value by burning capital generated by profitable ventures that could have been invested in said profitable ventures instead of follies like boat building.

I do get why they did go bigger, in the short runt it did make a whole lot of sense.
It's true that a current boat owner most likely will want a slightly bigger boat the next time he buys. Going bigger is the easiest way to make a product seem better than the one he has already got; the auto industry knows this, hence a 3 series is currently the size of a 20 yo 5 series, but BMW has re-populated the size slot once held by the 3 series by introducing the 1 series. Boat builders, on the other hand, just crosses their fingers and hopes that the Chinese/Russians/Bankers/Arabs/Lottery winners/footballer will buy large boats so there will be no need for actuall production improvements.
 
Maybe it's just me, but whilst Princess and Sunseeker seem to be going bigger and bigger (both in terms of boat size and financially unchartered territory), we see more American boats being imported into the UK. Cruiser appointed Ideal Boats and Monterey is back through Gibbs. Probably a more realistic proposition? Volume usually works when fixed costs are high....
 
Deleted User said:
Er most of them have retired there for the good life! I'm not disputing the fact that France has its many attractions but creating wealth and keeping it out of the hands of the French taxman isn't one of them;)
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I think the general idea is that you earn your pennies in England & retire to France for their health care, etc. systems.

ATB,

John G
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34997865

Mr Ahmed, in the 10 weeks in charge of Fairline boats, not once did you ever come face to face with the workforce and address them to your plans of going fwd. In the first week of you being Ceo you laid off 107+ employees with NO pay. Some of these have served the company for 45 years! You stated it was for around a month, it's now 10 weeks and most have been forced to resign. On top of this you have laid off another 43 workers again unpaid,then around 13 supervisors again unpaid,not paid in company or employee pension contributions for up to 3 months. Not paid in employee union subs. Gave less than a weeks notice that employees would not be getting there weekly pay for 3 weeks. All this leading up to Christmas. Then in a statement you use the term "Gutted " about the administrators entering the company.

I sincerely hope karma meets you soon.
 
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