Member Info for Talk2Much

Scampthedog - Don't be too proud. I can see how you rub a lot of people up the wrong way with some of the attitude in your posts.

Your use of the word "IF" so much simply means your hedging your bets, so you would have been right if it found support at any of those levels but you would also have been correct if it did not. Not difficult being right when you've covered every possibility. I mean, tonight IF Arsenal score more goals than City then they could win, otherwise they might get a draw or they could lose.

The SWW is a clever move. The only way RMG ever get hours out of delivery offices is when they use revisions to do so. This forces the issue, meaning that it will (effectively) be paid for by the increased productivity that revisions provide. Both sides can feel like they've won here, which is how they managed to get that into the agreement if you ask me.

Do you think the agreement will be well received (in general) by the membership? The usual vocal posters on FB / RMC will shout and moan regardless but I think this looks like a good deal for both sides and certainly provides the right platform for the business and its ongoing relationship with the CWU.

I think this should be considered acceptable by a majority. It addresses the big concerns around pay and the shorter working week.

Most CWU grades wanted assurance that pay would be backdated to April and this has been agreed.
The next hour of the SWW being part of the revision process means that a revision will effectively provide a further 2.7% pay rise based on hourly rates, plus a further 1% on top of that in April 2021.
I think it's sensible to keep it as only a 2 year pay deal as well. There's so much uncertainty around profitability and the changing mail mix that both parties will want to know more about how much money there could be to go around in 2022.

Spudy, don't expect to see STD for a while unless the shares start doing something in line with his predictions again :)

Tbh, I'm not sure if this qualifies as "support" being found or if, like yesterday, we're just tracking the broader FTSE 250 which is also bouncing a little today.

I'm not so certain that this is related to the agreement which nobody knows the precise details of. If you put RMG's price movement chart this morning on top of the FSTE 250's general movement they're very similar. Both hit the lows at 8:06 and quickly bounced back up by 08:13 followed by a slow decline to where we are right now. In fact, compared to the FTSE 250, RMG are over performing (RMG -1.45%; FTSE 250 -1.87% at the time of writing).
I could be wrong, but I always prefer the simplest explanations when trying to understand the cause of something.

Yes a bit of a dip... no doubt Scamp will be on telling us he forecast this, but we're back into Monday/Tuesday range. I can't explain the enthusiasm for it yesterday, but I guess it's run out of steam!!

Boark - nice site... I like that one thanks.
Taff / Shaunymac - mail every day here and even my next day parcels are all arriving fairly early in the day. I must be in a well resourced area!
On things that could affect the shares currently, unusually for RMG right now it looks like they are getting on better with the CWU (the posties union) than they are with the CMA (the managers union). There was a consultative ballot and the vast majority of managers said they would support strike action or industrial action short of strike action. RMG appear to have paid no attention to this sentiment and are driving on with their changes. Posties have had their bonus confirmed for Xmas whilst managers have been told there will be no bonus, which probably won't help things. Oddly, I'm not sure that managerial action would have the same impact as any CWU action would... a lot of CWU grade staff cover manager jobs and know how to run an office, so as long as enough senior management were available the business would probably still operate fairly normally. Either way, could create some volatility.

JB - Here's a link to my file where I combined the FTSE 100 and FSTE 250 (as far as RMG) that I used to gauge the share value that would (currently) put is in FSTE 100 territory. The market cap figures are all based on yesterday's close.
https://1drv.ms/x/s!ApXzuJiwELCuo027sLECc5CQqLFv?e=0WwAUp

JB - the sites I used are https://lsemarketcap.com/ for the FTSE 100 and https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-250/constituents/table for the FSTE 250. The tables are in slightly different formats but I prefer the LSE market cap website as it lists all 100, whilst the FTSE 250 constituents were listed 20 per page.

A little more research shows around 20 companies in the FTSE 250 with a higher marker cap than RMG. Blending the two tables suggests that for inclusion in the FTSE100 at this stage, you'd need a market cap of around 4.3 billion or GBp 4.30 per share.

The lowest market cap of any company currently in the FTSE 100 is for Homeserve.
Their current market cap is a shade under GBp 3.7B.
RMG's market cap is easy to work out as they issue 1 Billion shares, so whatever the share price is in pounds and pence is our current market cap in billions. At the time of writing, that's GBp 3.37B.
Of course, there may be other markets in the FTSE 250 that already have a higher market cap than Homeserve, so just overtaking them might not be enough to get into the FSTE 100.

Scamp, I'm not the most frequent visitor to this page, but I notice that the moment the shares are doing what you predicted, you are all over it. Monday exclaiming how they were 3.24 and dropping, and then today how they were 3.25 (low 3.21) and later describing it as a pull back over several days. Strangely we close today with an increase and sit at 3.28.
Small time investor that I am, I still think that making any judgement calls based on a couple of days trend is a little premature. At this point much of Thursday/Friday gains are gone, but we're still above the close on Wednesday. I think the closing price is a better indicator than what happens intraday.
Investor behaviour such as "buy on the rumour sell on the news" may have led to the increases Thursday/Friday as many people were expecting CWU & RMG to be in a position to reach agreement. The timing of the announcement by CWU on their website that no agreement had been reached coincides with the start of the sell-off which has meant we're back where we were on Wednesday.
I don't want this to come across as personal, as it is evident that you react very poorly to any criticism. I am simply putting my point across.

3.24? Omg this is a catastrophic correction. We've not seen the shares as low as this since, erm, last Wednesday...

Run for the hills...

OliGarch, some food for though there thanks! The CWU have already raised their concerns around the impact to jobs when the USO was relaxed earlier this year. The figure they stated was 20,000 jobs at risk. I'm not sure that parcel volumes on a Sunday would be so great as to require a significant increase - we'd very much have to wait and see on that one. One parcel driver would normally deal with the parcels for a number of regular delivery routes. If letters were Mon-Fri and parcels were Mon-Sun, the Saturday/Sunday cover would therefore be around a third or a quarter and only two days a week. Although the parcels USO is currently only 5 days, they are generally delivered 6 days a week already. Some of the parcel jobs could be created by keeping a few day-off covers in rotation, but it would be interesting to see how RMG would resource Sundays. Sunday still pays a premium in RMG, making it expensive to offer the service. As many couriers either don't offer Sunday delivery or charge a premium for it, no doubt RMG would have to make it a separate service to help balance the costs.
Sorry that's a slightly disjointed post. If JBThistle's numbers on attrition are accurate then maybe natural turnover will mean fewer people losing jobs, and maybe an increase to support the changes to parcel deliveries will further offset this. I don't believe that there will be enough work created by a Sunday parcels service to remove all of that risk though.

OliGarch,
If RMG drop to a 5 day week, there's a group of employees that are day-off covers that would no longer be required. In many offices, posties work a 5-day week with a rotating day off. Letter delivery has to take place 6 days a week, so the day-off covers will work the days off for 5 posties.
Effectively, to cover 5 jobs you need 6 people when letter deliveries are 6 days a week. 5 jobs x 6 days covered by 6 people x 5 days.
Some jobs would need to be retained to enable cover of all necessary parcel deliveries, and there may even be some new jobs if parcel delivery does increase to 7 days a week as has been suggested.

Hi gang - good to see the same faces winding each other up as usual, just thought I'd chip in with my point of view as it's been a while.
I've got a relatively small holding of just over 2k shares and I regret not adding to it when this was below £2. I think this has a very good long term outlook, and should at the very least stay stable in the shorter term. I'm a little concerned at discussions suggesting a drop of under 2% is a sell-off, especially when volumes look quite low at the moment.
The half-year results stood up quite well, especially when you consider there's a £140m charge against redundancies in there. Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting, but that would suggest that if the company didn't have to pay for significant managerial redundancies, they could actually have posted a reasonable profit at half year. Given the the second half of the year will include peak time, this would point to a full year profit in spite of all the headwinds currently being faced.
The decline in letters is playing into the hands of a USO review, especially when Ofcom themselves have said that losing one day a week won't have a significant impact. With expected savings of around £225m, that would certainly support profitability - but you'd have to expect a CWU backlash initially due to the inevitable job losses. I can't see the public being too concerned either way about Saturday letters - if people really thought letters were that important, the volumes wouldn't continue to be in decline.
I think the increase in parcels is not going to fall away post pandemic either. Most of us have got very used to ordering online and now that everybody realises how easy it is to return anything we don't like or that doesn't work, the excuses for using the high street are all but gone. Don't use your car, don't pay for fuel or parking, and with most deliveries don't even pay for postage. Why would you go to the shop?

All in all, I think there are plenty of reasons to feel positive in the long run, but it's probably going to hover in the £3 - £3.5 in the shorter term until we actually see some more significant news from RMG.

Just my humble opinion as a small-time investor!

I've been following the chat on here for some time now and I have a few opinions / reactions to what I'm reading.
First, the business itself is not in bad shape. The real issue for RMG is that it does indeed offer the best pay and terms and conditions of any logistics/delivery company. They provide a fantastic service but have to compete with parcel companies that get away with paying by the parcel so that their "employees" can barely achieve minimum wage. When letters were in abundance this was not a problem, because RMG can automate the vast majority of their letters, but nowhere near as many of their parcels. You get a few letters to a single door and you've covered the cost of getting them there and then some. The issue is the loss of letters combined with the fact that QoS isn't everything to everyone with parcels. Sending parcels by RMG is expensive but reliable and in a time when cost is everything, the scales can swing between what is more important.
Reading about posties who are enjoying their "easy life", well that is part of what is currently making RMG loss making - people having an easy life. I have no issues with unions, and the CWU has done a fantastic job maintaining excellent terms and conditions for employees, but to be pushing for shorter working weeks and pay rises in a business expecting to lose in the region of 300 million GBP this year seems a little counterintuitive.
The business needs to ramp up parcel automation asap and change the delivery model to support parcels with the occasional letter instead of letters with the occasional parcel. That can only be done by agreement with the union, and if they can achieve that then I still believe there is upside potential here. The USO will probably change which would potentially have huge benefit to RMG, but that will be 18 months in the making and the business needs to act before that.

Everything I've said is my personal opinion so don't make any judgements based on it, but I would be interested to see how some of you guys on here feel about what I've said - Oli, Wolves, 200, ABRoyal etc. Please don't get personal though.