AMID BHP Billiton's trumpeting of its results, and a boon for shareholders thanks to the increased dividend, a few investors noticed that a little bit of history seems to have been rewritten among the numbers.
It surrounds the Ravensthorpe Nickel Project, initially a $1.8 billion project to build a new mine and processing facility to produce a "mixed nickel and cobalt hydroxide intermediate product", known in the business as "MHP", over the next 25 years.
That $1.8 billion budget, unfortunately, proved a little optimistic - the whole project has been running hugely over budget and far from schedule for some time.
You only have to take a peek at BHP's investor presentation from December last year, entitled A Matter Of Value, to see just how Ravensthorpe had blown its budget. And again, in another investor presentation from April 30 this year, in which BHP conceded that Ravensthorpe was both over budget and behind schedule.
We've included a few slides from those presentations to show just how far over budget Ravensthorpe had climbed.
But something magical seems to have happened since then - Ravensthorpe is back in the "black", so to speak, and is now both on time and under budget in the latest results presentation put out by BHP.
Indeed, it has been constructed for $2.09 billion, $110 million under budget. Yet, even for the mathematically challenged, $2.09 billion seems a touch above the original forecast of $1.8 billion.
So, what was the magical formula? A footnote explained it all: "as per revised budget or schedule".
With the simple stroke of a pen, some of the money the Chinese economy has been putting into BHP's coffers over the past 12 months was slid across the ledger and into Ravensthorpe's costings.
It's now below a "revised budget" of $2.2 billion.
If only newspaper editors could be so accommodating with their deadlines.
By Acronymous
AMERICA is not just the land of the free, but also the land of the puzzling acronym.
US corporate culture has given us the CEO (chief executive), the VP (vice-president), the DVP (deputy vice-president), the EVP (executive vice-president) and even the DEVP (deputy executive vice-president).
It's a little hard to stand out among all the VPs and DVPs, but US-based Macrovision has a title that's hard to beat.
One Richard Bullwinkle is listed as the chief evangelist.
Which not only suggests that the company, which provides copy protection encoding for DVD movies and video games, has some form of gospel that it wants to preach to the world, but that the Reverend Bullwinkle also has a whole team of subordinate evangelists working for him.
The term is, apparently a relic from the boom days of Silicon Valley, when companies employed staff to spread the technology word to the world.
Macrovision's chief evangelist will be a keynote speaker at the CONNECTIONS Europe Summit in Berlin later this month, where he can hopefully spread the US penchant for brevity of job title to the Germans.
Deutsche Telekom's guest speaker at the event is Klaus Milczewsky, who is listed as the company's "senior manager for innovation management, technology management products & innovation, Home Gateway initiative".
That must be one mighty business card.
A question of balance Continued…
