New acquisition NOW Couriers should help Freightways
continue to dominate the growing Auckland delivery market.
News yesterday that the New Zealand courier and document information management company Freightways [FRE] is to buy the small Auckland courier company Now Couriers for around NZ$11 million should be welcome news for shareholders.
Not only that, the faith Freightway's management have in the long-term future of their business with this purchase, during the current economic downturn and associated credit crunch is a positive move, when every other business in New Zealand seems to be talking gloom and doom.
Freightways as a whole, has managed to ride out the economic slowdown and increased business costs very well. It has still managed to grow revenue and profit slightly over the last year.
Their core courier business seems to be one of the most resilient divisions and Auckland especially seems reasonably bullish.
NOW has 40 contracted owner drivers servicing greater Auckland, and is at the budget end of the market, so it compliments Freightways other brands: Sub 60, Castle Parcels, New Zealand Couriers, Post Haste and several other brands.
Management want to keep the latest acquisition separate from the others as it wants to differentiate it from its other nationally focused brands.
I like the way management have had a partnership with NOW for several years, got to know the company well and then bought control. Too many companies rush into these sorts of acquisitions and that is where things can go horribly wrong. Freightway's management clearly have a good understanding of this business and that way the price they paid for it is more likely to be relevant to its earnings, prospects , and its long term future.
Their track record on "bolt-on" acquisitions is extremely good.
CEO Dean Bracewell has been a diligent head and the tough outlook for the New Zealand economy looks to be something he looks forward to with relish.
The future outlook by Bracewell is tempered by comments of influences from the local economy and that they are well positioned to grow when economic conditions are rosier.
He expects the core package delivery businesses to perform "soundly" and its fast growing documents division to be strong over the coming year.
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Disclosure: I own FRE shares
c Share Investor 2008
AN anniversary of a war is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region.
I am one of those who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of fragile truces, until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is not at all to redefine warfare and still less to contextualise it out of existence. But when I wrote the essays that go to make up A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, I was expressing an impatience with those who thought that hostilities had not really begun until George W. Bush gave a certain order in the spring of 2003.
Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy US involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath Party to power.
Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the US at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently.
In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.
If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favour in our nation's capital at the precise moment he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favour until the moment he decides to engulf his small Kuwaiti neighbour. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power, to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam's regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy.
We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war".
We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam or a decision to have done with him.
The President's speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.
That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups.
Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had believed or than the Bush administration had suggested.
This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself.
But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale.
A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.
The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.
A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.
The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.
Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.
Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Gaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much larger than anticipated) stock of WMD, if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship. None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty, and unintended consequences of their own.
I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.
Nonetheless, the thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadis), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?
The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur.
Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say attempt rather than do, which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice". But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited.
We were already deeply involved in the life and death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.
Christopher Hitchens is an author and commentator for publications such as Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly and Slate.
