Like any other companies operating in the current market
Fletcher Building Ltd is going to find the next 18 months or so very hard.
It has already forecast a much lower profit guidance of
$289 million to $354 million for FY 2009, such a wide ranging forecast because of extreme uncertainties in the market in which the company operates.
The
domestic housing markets in which it operates in; New Zealand,
Australia and the USA are experiencing major downturns and that
construction downturn coupled with the associated slowdown in supplies
of their building materials to said construction is having a big impact
on revenue and of course profit.
In my opinion this is likely to
get considerably worse before it gets better and shareholders probably
wont be seeing anything positive coming out of these domestic housing
markets until well into 2010-well later if governments in those
countries make the economy worse.
more at Share Investor Blog