Mbl Share Discussion Threads

[tommyjnewton] 15/2/2011 20:25

I seem to remember one poster predicting 50p some months back and here we are!

[kimboy2] 15/2/2011 12:00

I wonder if PC had to leave the room when his own bonus was discussed ?

[davidosh] 15/2/2011 11:50

When I speak to PC I am speaking to the whole of the remuneration committee in fact ! I think all the directors are well aware of shareholders thoughts. As before a new non exec or two should be high priority if they want to show shareholders that it is improving communication and corporate governance.

[davidosh] 15/2/2011 11:50

When I speak to PC I am speaking to the whole of the remuneration committee in fact ! I think all the directors are well aware of shareholders thoughts.

[timesmoney] 15/2/2011 11:26

davidosh. Have to keep reminding you this is not a blue chip with a properly constructed board. When you talk to PC about bonus's you are talking to half the renumeration committee and beneficiary of the scheme!

[kimboy2] 15/2/2011 11:19

I would presume that this strategic review has been looking at these type of opportunities.

[davidosh] 15/2/2011 11:13

Kimboy2...spot on there and surely a move three years ago into online platforms alongside their distribution would have seen MUBL worth at least the same as Kiddicare today. That is not to say they cannot build from here but Morrisons can no longer be considered 'a given' and the change in management there certainly made the difference. On the question of bonuses I did question PC about this year and he said bonuses are extremely unlikely as targets will not have been met. It is a shame shareholders are not advised on targets at the start of each scheme just so we know where we stand even better if we could approve them at the Agm in the middle of each year !

[kimboy2] 15/2/2011 09:58

If the theory is correct then TA's greed seems to have cost him a lot more than he has gained. I presume that there is no similar bonus this year. It would be interesting to actually know the wording so that we are aware of when it is payable. Perhaps it should be approved at the AGM.

On the MRW purchase of Kiddicare I don't think it precludes something similar to the Sainsburys arrangement. It would however suggest that MRW isn't going to acquire MUBL. I feel certain that they ran the slide rule though.

I think the lesson from Kiddicare is what can be done from online development. In 3 years it has grown from virtually zilch to a company worth £70m by exploiting a niche market.

That is what MUBL should be doing.

[timesmoney] 15/2/2011 09:40

As my old Dad said. take the bus to see the buyers and leave the Roller at home in the garage!

[masurenguy] 15/2/2011 09:33

Shanklin - 15 Feb'11 - 3575: If MUBL wanted to keep the MRW contract, which they still may well do, the payment of such huge bonuses to TA, PC and LC was perhaps a long way from being astute.It must have hacked off the MRW staff they have to negotiate with and, whether true or not, suggested to them that MUBL were making supra-normal profits on the current arrangement and, at best, needed to be brought back into line.

Absolutely right shanklin - it was a neon advert to their largest customer that they were making sufficient profit out of them to fund such enormous salary & bonus payments, in relation to the size of the business, to the Chairman & CEO. You might get away with it in a privately owned company but when you're public your accounts are very visible to all of your customers !

[shanklin] 15/2/2011 09:26

If MUBL wanted to keep the MRW contract, which they still may well do, the payment of such huge bonuses to TA, PC and LC was perhaps a long way from being astute.

It must have hacked off the MRW staff they have to negotiate with and, whether true or not, suggested to them that MUBL were making supra-normal profits on the current arrangement and, at best, needed to be brought back into line.

[typo56] 15/2/2011 08:58

It looks like it.

[strollingmolby] 15/2/2011 08:22

Does this close the door to MBL getting Morrisons online offering contract?



Supermarket group Morrisons (LON:MRW) has acquired Kiddicare, the award winning multi channel online retailer, together with the rights to its highly regarded technology platform, for £70m. The acquisition is the first step in developing Morrisons online business. The group said it intended to build its online non-food business, developing the kiddicare.com platform and management team, and launching its first products in 2012.

Dalton Philips, the chief executive of Morrisons, said: "This acquisition brings not only a respected, successful and fast growing specialist retailer into the Morrisons group but also a robust, scalable and highly advanced technology platform around which we can begin to build our e-commerce offer.

[kimboy2] 11/2/2011 11:25

Outnow looks to have been re-vamped.

[cockneyrebel] 10/2/2011 16:19

Yep, I'm sure this bod does get his CD's from a distributor Felix. The trouble is if he's the buyer and Sainsburys are another buyer they are both competing on price and buying CD's from the same distributor in all liklihood - so the distributor doesn't sell any more - he just has retailers needing to get the price down all the time.

CR

[felix99] 10/2/2011 11:30

I'm no lover of MUBL CR as you probably know but doesn't your Amazon trader have to buy his CDs off a distributor like MUBL? So your traders would keep MUBL in business.

I agree with your thoughts if the music labels suddnely were happy to deal direct with your amazon guy but they don't as far as I can see?

What will kill MUBL and your amazon bod is the downloading . I am looking at putting a Sonos system in my house and getting Napster with 60,000 odd songs on line and available to me to stream wirelessly around the house and play for £5 a month. Spotify does same thing but also allows you to own the music on your PC hard drive and share it amongst all yuor IPods etc as long as you are a subscriber at £10 per month as I understand it.

I am sure there are ways of getting around this ultimately if people want to rip off music on top.

We can;t be far off the day when noone buys a disc anymore they just download via itunes for life etc.

That is what will kill MUBL .

PS I hate buying anything generally where I have on ongoing subscription to keep it. But for £60 or £120 a year that must be appealing to anyone that buys more than even half a dozen CD's a year ? Maybe Napster etc don;t have latest releases I dont know - and I am a dinousaur for music and not bothered if don;t have latest albums as soon as they come out ?

[cockneyrebel] 10/2/2011 11:06

Putting all the shennanigans aside with the diirectors and the goings on here, can someone explain to me the business case for MUBL now, selling CD's and DVD's?

I met a guy recently that sells CD's and DVD's via Amazon. He has a music shop but selling CD's and games was getting too tough so he started trading on Amazon. He now does about 2m CD's (a lot less DVD's) a year through Amazon. The thing is he doesn't have to hold any stock. I don't know if he developed the software or bought it in but he gets the orders via Amazon and at the end of the day the computer generates an order to the suppliers and they are all delivered to him the following morning for him to despatch. He works on tiny margins but can undercut anyone on Amazon most of the time and usually does.

If it's that easy to set up a CD/DVD business and trade like that then lots more people will do it and the margins will just get tighter imo.

The internet has been a fantastic revolution and empowered so many but the more I look at it the more you start to realise how it destroys so many existing businesses unless you can really embrace it and with a product that isn't mass supplied.

When I was a kid you could set up a small retailer from scratch. Say you were selling Guitars, Les Pauls perhaps. For most people wanting one they would either have to scour New Musical Express or rake through Exchange and Mart or go to the nearest retailer of Les Paul Guitars. They wouldn't really know whether they had got a great deal on the guitar or not as long as it came in pretty affordable. Today you can search the internet, go to price comparison sites and the like and find what must be the guaranteed lowest price for whatever you are buying. Look at Jessops and their demise. That was a business that dominated the sector for cameras but as soon as the internet came along it became so easy for cometitors to beat their prices from lower overheads that they went boobs up as far as a listed company goes.

You can see the same thing throughout the high street with various products, it's only Scope and all the charity shops that are doing any business and the more they dominate the high street the less people with money to spend want to go there so its a self-feeding cycle imo.

The only retail businesses that will do well are those that have a niche product where they can keep the margins up or where supply is limited.

With CD's/DVD's I just cannot see it. They are an ever decreasing priced commodity. I can see why MUBL may have moved to trying to do downloads but in my view they are both too late to the game and this is another market that is getting flooded by new businesses and 'me too' types like Sky all doing the same thing - it's CD retailers all over again but just over the internet. Margins will reduce here too imo.

So with all that in mind, and being a distributor who is caught between the pressures on them to pay as much as possible from the manufacturer and to accept as little as possible from the retailer - what makes this an attractive business, even if it was run openly and professionally?

If I look around the stock market today I can see so many fully listed companies with great prospects - why would I choose to invest here even at 50p a share when there are so many great opportunities out there?

I'm just interested to see if anyone can tell me what the attraction is - like does anyone thing the outlook here will suddenly change because CD's and DVD's and downloads are going to see much higher prices and better margins because unless that was to happen I can't see how these can grow earnings with all the competition like one man bands on Amazon creating for retailers which in the end pressure distributors.

All just my opinion.

CR

[timesmoney] 09/2/2011 17:36

Yes JonC we are sometimes guilty of looking too hard.
The share price does not lie.

[jonc] 09/2/2011 17:09

With respect to all holders.

Look at the share price.

Does that indicate that all is well with the company and it's business.

If you don't understand something then you should not invest/short it.

The lack of transparency here means that you cannot understand it.

The price rarely lies.

[davidosh] 09/2/2011 17:00

Typo56....I think the readers and holders here were very interested,indeed some copied the comments before they were pulled. It now looks like the second poster who may or may not have been the same person has also been blocked or gone away.

My guess would be a disgruntled ex employee who knows enough and wants to annoy his ex employers as is so often the case when they know that these boards are supposedly read and used by 'the owners'. They may have knowledge that is useful to competitors too of course and at a time when the company is tendering for a large contract things become much more sensitive and they may try saying things that Morrisons would not like too.

If he is genuine then I am sure there are better ways to solve his dispute. If I get the chance I may ask the new FD who he has annoyed already ....lol

[typo56] 09/2/2011 16:34

I don't think you can assume the company is monitoring the BB and asking for posts to be pulled, although they may well be. It might be another reader of the board with a position to worry about.

[kimboy2] 09/2/2011 15:41

Well I don't think that they bought a company for £100k in July. I would have thought it unlikely that they would have had to report it if they did.

They may well however have bought some assets from some company that had perhaps gone bust. The interim accounts to 30/9/10 show in the cash flow payment for 'property, plant & equipment' of £940k, as well as purchase of intangibles of £324k.

If they did purchase something I presume it is inthese items. The purchase of GMV, for example, is shown as an 'acquisition of subsidiary' in 2010 full year.

One or two things are intersting though. Firstly obviously someone from the company is watching our unworthy deliberations here and was concerned enough about boaf/CBS to have him removed.

You could take the view that the company has something to hide from that. On the other hand he was quite clearly out to be malicious and intent on damaging the company.

I did not see anything substantive in what he has said so far. Perhaps he has said more to daviddosh. I can understand why the company don't want things repeated which are essentially libellous if untrue, which I believe they are. Nor do they want the minutes from management meetings posting which he was threatening to do.

Secondly I thought the announcement that they had bought the assets of outnow showed a more positive approach from the management. Perhaps now that the MBO is not going ahead we can feel that they are back on our side again.

[timesmoney] 09/2/2011 14:55

The issues raised may be legitimate concerns. The company may well be better off rebutting them and exposing a trouble maker rather than air brushing him out.
Did they buy an unannounced co for £100k if so this guy is clearly an insider. Despite the aim rules the company should not be making acquisitions without informing the shareholders if they suggest the transaction was neither material nor earnings enhancing why bother with it in the first place?

[fmcalorum] 09/2/2011 14:49

He is playing games in my opinion! Could he have bought 10k of shares today???