Christine Holgate beefed up Australia Post profit and the veges are stewing

Let me give you — the owners of Australia Post — the stunning numbers the board and acting CEO didn’t want to.

Australia Post’s former group chief executive officer and managing director Christine Holgate.

On Thursday Australia Post announced its profit had leapt a stunning 100 per cent – that’s right, it doubled – from $83m to $166.3m in the December half.

Except it did not announce any such thing.

Acting CEO Rodney Boys managed to spell out percentage increases for revenue in the six months. He said group revenue had leapt by 15.5 per cent to $4.3bn, because of a 25.9 per cent surge in revenue in the parcels business to $3.4bn.

It is now overwhelmingly AusPost’s major business, thanks to the efforts of its last two — unnamed and unthanked — CEOs.

Letters revenue continued to fall, dropping 13.6 per cent to less than a billion. It now makes up just 20 per cent of group revenue, while its rather large losses soak away a big chunk of the significant and growing profits from parcels delivery.

Yes, Boys and the AusPost board of directors which must have approved the statement managed to both calculate and then announce the percentage changes for revenues.

But somehow they couldn’t manage to do it for the profit. All the statement said was: “Group profit before tax at $166.6m, including letter losses of $74.2m”.

Indeed, they couldn’t even bring themselves to actually state the number for the parcels profit. It’s $240.8m; you – very easily – get it by adding those two figures together.

But you have to Google to get the group profit figure for the December 2019 half; that then enables you to calculate the percentage increase — or, to put it more accurately, the stunning leap, the 100 per cent.

Gee, I wonder why neither board nor CEO could bring themselves to even detail – far less shout from the figurative rooftops – such a stunning result.

The door was opened, so to speak, for AusPost’s parcels by the lockdowns. But more critically, AusPost was apparently in great shape to very profitably go through it.

Let me give you — you, the owners of AusPost — the numbers that board and acting CEO didn’t want to.

Revenue of the parcels business was up 25.9 per cent. Yes, they did, generously, tell you that. They didn’t tell you that profit of the parcels business rose a similar 25 per cent.

So the gross margin in the parcels business held at 7c in the revenue dollar — through a half which, yes, did deliver an unprecedented surge in business, but also put AusPost under equally unprecedented huge pressure.

Now, I wonder why neither board nor CEO – sorry, acting CEO – spelt out the great numbers?

Do ya thunk, do you really thunk, it might have had just a teeny bit something to do with – what’s that name again? – oh yes, Holgate. Yes, that’s right; I think it’s Christine Holgate.

You see, if the statement had spelt out that profit had doubled in the half, it might have been a bit odd not to refer to the person who had been CEO for four of the six months.

That was, until she was slimed out of her office by an hysterically hypocritical Prime Minister; a spineless AusPost chairman; and a board intent on acting out one of the great jokes about the late, and great, Maggie Thatcher.

That’s the one about Maggie taking to lunch her cabinet of, mostly, men of mostly indifferent ability – that’s to say, pretty much the description of the AusPost board.

Sitting at the head of the table, she’s asked what she will have. The steak. Well done.

And the vegetables? They’ll have the same.

Indeed. Ditto, downunder.

Clearly the AusPost results are all down to Holgate’s leadership – not just in the specific six months, during which she was CEO for the first four, but indeed the entire three years she was CEO, where she directly built on the investment in parcels by her predecessor Ahmed Fahour.

Thanks to her, AusPost was mission-ready for the lockdowns opportunity – and the tens of millions of profit that ensued.

Indeed further, AusPost might now also be getting significant bang from the deal she did with the banks, which was the basis of the ludicrous hysteria over the $20k of watches.

Who knows? You can’t expect transparency or indeed anything much at all from this AusPost board, whether vegetabilised or just rabbits frozen in the glare of the spotlight, far less its hapless and hopeless chairman Lucio Di Bartolomeo.

It’s approaching four months since Di Bartolomeo so appallingly allowed Holgate to be slimed out of her job by Scott Morrison – something that, on the evidence of these AusPost numbers, is clearly a very significant loss to AusPost.

Any chairman with the slightest sense of self-awareness would have apologised to Holgate and to you – all 26 million of you, the real owners of AusPost, as the PM keeps reminding us – for bending to the utterly inappropriate pressure from the PM.

Such a chairman would also have, belatedly, lodged his resignation with the profit report, which showed so damningly the cost of Holgate’s loss to AusPost.

Yet, he, his board and his acting CEO can’t even bring themselves to mention her name, far less give her the credit she deserves.

Boys did reference reforms which had reduced “head office support costs by $23m”.

Gee, you wonder again what CEO might have driven that? Might it have been the same one who so outrageously spent $20k – less than 0.1 per cent of those head office savings alone? You know the “head” office which the CEO inhabits and presides over?

Yet it’s like Holgate is the Voldemort of the AusPost boardroom – “She Who Must Not Be Named”; the “Dark Lord” that snivelling lesser people such as Di Bartolomeo and his fellow rabbits/vegetables go in hourly fear of.

Since accepting her resignation back at the start of November, Di Bartolomeo has been figuratively hiding under the AusPost board table.

There hasn’t been a single statement from him; not even on the inquiry which cleared her and utterly damned the AusPost board.

Please come out from under the table and go; just go.