The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.
(Questions from industry analysts are provided in full, but answers are omitted - download the transcript to see the full question-and-answer session)
Question: Andrew J. Wilson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst
: I just have 1 left, actually. A lot of the areas I wanted to discuss have been covered. It's kind of a question around -- I guess, it's really on the M&A
side. And just I'm interested in the potential sentiment amongst the vendors as some of the better assets that you might have not been able to
buy previously that might be interested in?
And it's really thinking about the sort of -- you look at Ashtead performance through the downturn where you've clearly been able to continue to
invest. And that, I presume, hasn't been true of businesses in the same market, then you come out of into a recovery phase and basically, it's
extremely hard to get equipment and it's getting increasing expenses to do so.
Has that sort of driven a shift in terms of some of these vendors, basically convincing them that selling might be a better idea than trying to continue
to fight this out? It just seems to me that the last 12 months will probably have given people a pretty stark, I guess, explanation of what this market
is going to look like and almost, therefore, be a bit more inclined to sort of join with Ashtead rather than try and compete against? I just interested
in terms of our sentiment.
Question: Karl Green - RBC Capital Markets, Research Division - Analyst
: Just a couple of final questions for me. Just firstly, in terms of managing the labor force and thinking about minimizing the need to hire in new
talent. What sort of labor capacity slack do you have at the moment?
I'm thinking there in terms of being able to offer people incremental over time to their total wage package goes up, they feel happier your retention
continues to improve?
And then the second question unrelated, just around depreciation. Given that tightness of supply, are you likely to see any assets over the coming
12 to 18 months, which are going to be rented out but are fully depreciated? Or is that too much of a risk in terms of reliability from your perspective?
Question: Karl Green - RBC Capital Markets, Research Division - Analyst
: That's really helpful. And just following on from that, have you got any retention statistics you can share in terms of how that's tracking at the
moment versus, say, 2019, I guess, 2020 is probably quite irrelevant?
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