I find myself continually drawn back to (lose more money with) Utilitywise (LON:UTW) but not today having read this, from transcript of analyst meeting, 22nd March 2018.
Unidentified analyst:
Can you be a bit clearer on what expectations you're in line with to be clear?
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Richard Stephen Laker, Utilitywise Plc - CFO, Company Secretary & Executive Director [24]
Yes. So the expectations that we're talking about are -- and this is a good point you raised, Ben. There's a slight subtlety to this, and it's a slightly oblique one. And it's a -- the -- it actually talks about trading line with bold expectation rather than the market expectation. And actually, it come back to Brendan's point, which is actually covered in that complementary's sort of or supplementary Q&A R&S, which I don't know if you've seen that as well this morning. But there's a section there which actually asks the question how is management going to run the business almost day-to-day with this new accounting policy, we make the point which is actually interim -- effectively our management accounts on a 20% constant leakage basis. A, because hopefully, the data we've shown you in the sort of strategic report in these slides kind of supports the 20% is reasonable. Accepting that under the format is the big contracts leak by more. And the secondly, is the point that we know, we see that as being broadly analogous to cash flow. And therefore, effectively, our internal expectation only have 20% constant consumption basis. I accept this is a slightly irregular position and that we all understand that broadly a company's expectation should be materially the same as the markets expectation. Otherwise, we'd be under a reporting obligation to say something to the markets. And so there is a kind of close correlation between them. But we're broadly saying effectively on a 20% constant consumption basis that we traded in the first half in line with our expectations. I'm not sure how useful that is to an equity analyst like yourself, but that is just sort of truth of the matter.
