The carnage caused by Stagecoach’s American bus crash is now apparent for all to see and grisly viewing it makes too. Together with the £800m goodwill charge taken at the time of the Coach USA deal, the latest £376m write-down means that Stagecoach has in effect written off its entire investment.
But is it contrite? Do one-man operated buses ever have change for a tenner? With a swift glance in his rear view mirror, Stagecoach’s current driver, Keith Cochrane, concedes that with hindsight the company overpaid but insists he still has no regrets about the original purchase.Mike Kinski, the original architect of the deal, was thrown off the bus a year ago along with Larry King, the former chief executive of Coach USA. But it still requires a huge act of faith to believe that the current management has got control of the steering wheel again. Profit margins are down by a third on the levels inherited by Stagecoach just two years ago and although the driver shortage is not as acute as it was, Coach USA is still laden down by rising fuel and insurance costs.Mr Cochrane says he is confident that the cost base has been “stabilised” and reckons that on the revenue front, initiatives like the new sightseeing double deckers introduced into New York will earn big bucks from the tourists.

Has he looked at the dollar exchange rate lately? Coach USA may have begun the uphill climb back to recovery, but, if so, it looks like an odd time for its current chief executive and co-founder, Frank Gallagher, to retire to count his millions.If the rest of Stagecoach was firing on all cylinders, it wouldn’t look too bad, but it’s not. Bus profits in the UK are falling and Stagecoach must be glad it only has to shoulder half the operating losses from its joint ownership of Virgin Rail. South West Trains, which has traditionally been a money spinner, has had to agree much tougher terms to secure its new 20 year franchise.Brian Souter, Stagecoach’s founder, harboured hopes not that long ago of taking the company private. The way things are going, he could be forgiven for wanting to join Mr Gallaher by cashing in his chips and leaving the bus completely.Bookham Tech Things seem to be going from bad to worse in the beleaguered telecoms equipment sector, and for Bookham Technology in particular.

Over the past six months there have been so many profits warnings (or should that be loss warnings) from this one time glamour stock that it’s hard to keep count. Yesterday there was another one.Instead of the previously forecast 25 to 40 per cent decline in revenues between the the first and second quarters, the group is now predicting a 45 to 55 per cent fall. Just to put that in context, sales are still running at a higher level than this time last year, which is something at least.The trouble is that for Bookham to be a viable proposition requires really much higher year-on-year rates of growth. By this stage in its development, Bookham should have been cash positive, or close to it at any rate.

Instead of which the cash burn remains stubbornly fixed at £30m a quarter, despite renewed efforts outlined yesterday to cut jobs and belt tighten more generally Sorry folks, but another 100 jobs are going in Swindon. You don’t need a degree in mathematics to figure out that with balance sheet cash of £236m at the end of March, the company will run out of money in less than two years unless things pick up soon.It’s hard to believe now, but Goldman Sachs was roundly criticised in the financial press for failing to include a retail element when it floated Bookham on the stock market. Instead it placed all the stock with its institutional cronies. The shares were floated at £10 each and the equity topped up later with a £100m secondary issue at £33.50 a share. Last night, the shares closed at a miserable 235p and those who refused to buy in protest at Goldman’s selective allocation procedures will be counting themselves lucky.With the benefit of hindsight, it is extraordinary how naive investors were with companies like Bookham.

At their peak, Bookham traded at more than £50 a share, such was the investment appetite for anything to do with the New Economy. Valuations like this were always cloud cuckoo land, of course, but to the extent that there was any basis for them at all required the maintenance of extraordinarily high rates of growth for a minimum four to five year period. Forecasting to the middle of next week is tough enough, but that far ahead is impossible.So much for the excess. Now that we live in more sober times, can companies like Bookham hope to survive? Bookham’s chief executive is these days a tough talking American Italian called Giorgio Anania. The founder, Andrew Rickman, has been kicked upstairs, but having pocketed £40m in the secondary offering, what does he care? Mr Anania continues to insist that the problem is just one of inventory reduction among his customers, but wisely he refuses to predict when the correction might go away. Most City analysts believe there should be real signs of a pick up by the end of this year. They may be right, but at this stage it’s largely wishful thinking.Bookham’s reliance on just three customers ­ Marconi, Nortel and Fujitsu ­ has become even more exaggerated over the last six months, and none of them is in any mood to be gentle with its suppliers right now.