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Paul2566, Sometimes the market goes a bit mental and has to be sectioned. E.g. about this time last year LGEN could be had for around £1.80 (currently £2.90+) which was quite obviously completely bonkers. Within a week or so it was back to £2.60 but a few canny individuals got as absolute bargain before it happened. Now in the case of DLG it seems that they lost a tiny fraction of their business recently which happens all the time but your average looney regards it as some sort of catastrophe and behaves accordingly.
It's not debt in the generally accepted sense of the word which is money you have borrowed and have to pay interest on and eventually repay so to my mind, the gearing concept is inapplicable. This is sometimes the problem with these accounting standards which get put together by the wally accountants on these boards who have little understanding of the unintended consequences principle. When I started out as an articled clerk nearly 60 years ago, we didn't have any written down standards, instead everything was done to accord with what was reckoned to be "fair and true" and the man in the street pretty well knew what that meant as he still does today. However, over the years some business men and their unprincipled accountants have gotten up to various kinds of chicanery as we all know such that a whole bunch of politicians and similar ignoramuses have required increasing amounts of quasi legislation to put it right but with little success. The original concept of "true and fair" seems to have faded into the background even tough it is still perfectly vaild IMO. On this basis a lease is a liability to pay a rent for a specified period of time and if you told the man in the street that it was a debt he would find it incomprehensible. Rant over LOL.
The "value" of a company is determined by both the market capital AND the SP because the first is merely a multiple of the second, OBVIUOSLY. However what really values a company is the return which for the shareholder of this company has been zilch since the beginning of time. Constantly the discussion centres around the price of Vanadium which is mostly irrelevant as is the price of cheese to Tesco shareholders. A well managed business produces profit AKA dividends for it's owners (shareholders) from the difference between costs and sales and it doesn't matter too much what the commodities are if the managers are skilled.
It doesn't really matter how employee bonuses are paid, the cost still comes off the EPS. Most businesses pay employee bonuses these days provided they are earned, my old company was paying them 50 years ago but we had to meet profit targets which was a huge incentive when said bonus could be 15% of one's salary.
There are always plenty of loonies around who see a small (in this case almost microscopic) change in one quarter as some kind of disaster and react accordingly. Due to faulty thinking, they completely ignore the very good half year result and the presence in that balance sheet of nearly £900m cash.
Without a lot of digging, I guess that the Accounting Standards Board decided that where a company has a significant amount/number of leases, the shareholders should be aware of them and the "value" thereof. This makes sense to me (retired accountant) and the way to do it without messinng up double entry principles is to put that value in the Balance Sheet as both an asset and a liability. Loads of businesses lease stuff all the time and of course interest rates are completely irrelevant. Personally I think it's a joke because the average shareholder would be utterly clueless as to the significance of the exercise.