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Speaker 1: Fletchers have had a pretty crappy year. It's fair to

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Speaker 1: say four hundred million bucks. The net loss for last

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Speaker 1: year twice as bad as the previous year six hundred

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Speaker 1: and forty million dollars, and losses over two years. Julian

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Speaker 1: Lee's is a Building Industry Federation CEO with me this morning, Julian,

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Speaker 1: Good morning.

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Speaker 2: Good morning, Ryan.

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Speaker 1: Geez, how much longer can you keep that up?

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Speaker 2: Oh? Look, it's I think only only features could probably

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Speaker 2: withstand a loss like that. But it does underscore against

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Speaker 2: the broader downturn that we're seeing across the whole construction sector,

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Speaker 2: where these sorts of economic pressures that we're seeing are

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Speaker 2: really reducing profitability and activity.

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Speaker 1: Plus they've got this Sky City lawsuit hanging over them.

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Speaker 1: There's a whole bunch of other risks that have been

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Speaker 1: going to be factored in two.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, look absolutely, but you know what, I think the

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Speaker 2: really interesting thing about this result was that they're actually

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Speaker 2: their underlying profit went from five hundred and nine million

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Speaker 2: down to three hundred and eighty four and that really high.

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Speaker 2: It's the fact that they were having squeezed margins across

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Speaker 2: you know, all of their all of their work and

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Speaker 2: that also again sort of highlights what we're seeing around

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Speaker 2: sort of delays, the and just the low margins that

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Speaker 2: that the sector is now having to face. And that's

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Speaker 2: and that's not good.

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Speaker 1: And the way that they're talking is like basically they're

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Speaker 1: in a holding pattern at the moment, they're hunkering down,

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Speaker 1: you know, environment remains uncertain, focus on cost control, operational discipline,

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Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, which is probably the sensible thing. Particularly, I guess

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Speaker 2: you know, they talk to their shareholders. But you know,

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Speaker 2: if you look at the sector, we've gone from last

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Speaker 2: year we had ninety nine billion dollars across building in construction.

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Speaker 2: That's dropped five billion dollars to ninety four billion this year.

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Speaker 2: So it's come down a lot. We've seen a lot

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Speaker 2: of job losses. I think it's been reported around twelve thousand.

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Speaker 2: So they are taking that conservative coach. I guess what

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Speaker 2: we have to now to look at is what's going

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Speaker 2: to be the things they are going to drive the

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Speaker 2: sort of recovery. You know, are there signs that you know,

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Speaker 2: building in construction is going to sort of come out

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Speaker 2: of us? Are we at the bottom? Ryan?

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Speaker 1: We'll see how those OCR cuts announced yesterday and the

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Speaker 1: track forward impact that Julian, Thank you. That's Julian Lees,

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Speaker 1: who's Building Industry Federation Chief executive. For more from Early

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Speaker 1: Edition with Ryan Bridge, Listen live to news talks. It'd

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