Acquisitions always make comparing different periods more tricky, as do one off adjustments.

My first thought was; great, a 50%+ jump in net profit off a ~12% lift in revenue shows the business is growing and scaling well. But the increase on a per share basis was only ~1.5%.

The obvious culprit is the issuance of a bunch of shares to fund the HBT acquisition, which increased the share count by about 46%. And given us pleb shareholders did not get to participate in the capital raise, that's a decent dilution.

But, then again, it's not as bad as it might look because we only got a 2 month contribution from the newly acquired HBT. That is, we cop the dilution straight away, but the full benefits of HBT wont be clear for a lot longer. Management have said that net margins of between 5-8% are expected by FY2028, so let's apply the lower end of that to get a sort-of normalised, post-synergised (is that a term?) NPAT of $3.6m for the half. A good deal higher than the $1.6m reported. And on a per share basis that's about 2.4cps. Double the statutory figure.

Let's double that for a very rough and ready 5cps FY EPS, which puts Stealth of a forward PE of (very) roughly 22x.

If you take management's reiterated guidance for FY28, you have $500m in revenue and (at the lower end) $25m in NPAT, which is around 15cps per share. Which is of course much higher than the sub-3c figure we might impute as an underlying figure for the current year.

The market doesnt seem to be buying that though, given the 10% drop.. maybe just a knee jerk reaction? It's not easy to see through things (including a big FX adjustment in the prior year), so i'll need to unpack this a lot more.

Just putting this out there to help make a bit of sense of things.