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glandore, though obviously I am looking at the potential from here, in many ways you are fair and reasonable about their slow progress.
At the risk of further prolonging the agony let me make 2 more points:
Fleet was always a ridiculously accident prone affair. That lost loads of time both with G1 and G2. The redesign and simplification and strengthening of the business design was of the essence - without which they would have stumbled further and further. So bravo on the redesign and outsourcing to Distributors. And also 5 years of learning is usually a formidable entry barrier for late entrants.
Secondly, yes the market entry is limited geographically thus far and only one new Distrbr - but CAT is worldwide and big and key point if they can get critical mass in Aussie and NZ then they can do it everywhere. The new guy and the planned G3 and chip equals increasing resources on this business. Sp the Board think that this can get legs.
Fair enough, another perspective. But the mention of G3 was sotte voce - a very understated reference on a time chart. The job at the moment is to sell G2. It is easy to forget that it took time to debug G2 and then covid presented a modest hiccup.
I think the slow scale up thus far is because it has taken them a lot of treasure and blood to sort the product and the whole value chain from mfg, logistics, marketing & fitment. The fact is that Fleet has been under resourced.
Additionally, the market is only just at the very beginning. Since, imo, they now have the product and set-up, it is up to SEE to get going and take it across the world.
At least the rate of fitments accelerated in November [700 units] versus 1950 units in the prior 4 months
They would be idiots to talk about G3 if it is not due for launch until 2022 - unless the idea is to kill sales of G2?
There are forecasts - read the Cenkos note which gives a target of 250k units fitted by 2025 i.e. compound growth rate of 60% pa
The local provenance of Max is irrelevant. Much of the Co is made up of Australians. Is that an issue?
The alteration in Mike's role might not reflect being bad at the job - I think they did well to set the thing up now to scale it. Mike has had a big increase in his HF work and if Fleet is going to be really big it needs a guy expert in telematics and logistics.
The emergence of competitors to Guardian is a positive i.e. the market is starting to happen. If there was going to be a market then then was always going to be competitors.
The key questions are: how big is the market potentially? How fast is it growing? Who has a market ready product with a plan for market access in place?
Given it took SEE 5 years plus to get to a reliable functioning product with logistics, manufacturing and distribution in place, imo, that puts SEE in a great position. But of course they have to make that advantage count and start aggressive acceleration of sales and fitment asap
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/12/08/dream-driverless-cars-crash/
Like it or not seeing2030, the set-up and the market has not yet existed. Now it will, is my contention. I am not being a fantasist. This is how I was taught Business Strategy analysis when I did an MBA specialising in New Ventures. I am not saying this is the outcome - I am saying that this has to be the objective.
VSI, one of top 20 logistics groups in the world and that act for Dyson, certainly are thinking that way. They didn't buy 10-% of the Co to make buttons
Fleet
Target market notionally 300m commercial vehicles. Assume with coming mandating of DMS on all new commercial vehicles by 2026 latest in EU that DMS will be adopted in large measure by the leaders in the freight industry before 2026. The reason is money. You save lots of money by avoiding accidents. Lorry accidents with sleeping drivers smash and kill others far more than private cars. The cost savings from reducing these accidents is simple commercial common sense - even if you don't give 2 hoots about "getting home safely"
The answer in my view is to unleash demand by reducing hardware cost / difficulty of installation i.e. G3 or G4 [the chip].
See have redesigned the Fleet business by sacrificing margin to the Distributors. This makes mass adoption now feasible [the distributors have the client base and the fitters].
Now the challenge is reduce the cost [as above] and scale at speed. They are already working on automating the monitoring activity
If they aren't aiming for a total potential market size of say eventually 30m i.e. 10% then I think they are small timing themselves. Of that 30m, why not aim to get say a third i.e. eventually 10m units installed?
10m units installed - say net off US$200 per customer [far less than current pricing - but an unanswerable cost benefit analysis]. That's US$2bn income pa. Why shouldn't they see the business opportunity like that? We are not playing games are we?? SEE have to be in this to win it.
Beat that Fovio.
glandore
I agree the Fleet fitment numbers were disappointing. Still they would work out at 25%pa growth rate if unchanged for this FY. The Results slide suggests a 60% compound rate over the next 4 years - so they need to get going. Presumably, the return to economic normality will make rolling out in new markets easier as well as getting all the current markets running better. Given that by 2026 all vehicles sold new in the EU will need DMS then it is a coming force now.
It is frustrating but all these new tech safety features in auto follow a hockey stick type take off. The bigger question for me is do SEE have the resources to respond when this happens? The redesign of the Fleet business makes this more feasible, imo
I met and like KK but none of us are perfect. So I interpret his "information" as susceptible to a different view i.e. such as I heard at CMD.
On Fleet, Schlemiel, I can only say that this is not the view I heard from VSI at CMD. I agree with them and thought that as logistics supremos they could really help Fleet take off [they weren't involved in the early efforts]
On announcing contract wins, I would only care if I needed the shares to go up each day. In fact, I'm OK about the recent share price progress and am confident in the competitive position of SEE. Given that, I far far prefer that they respect proper commercial norms and don't damage confidential commercial relationships by bragging to shareholders. Their marketing should be directed at Ford, BMW etc - not you and me.