If you look closely at the numbers behind the "beat", there are a lot of things to be concerned about, one of them being the precipitous drop in utilization that the last poster highlighted.

Another item I wonder about is the spike in accounts receivables. Someone on here brought up the point that strip center REITs like REG have seen their mom and pop tenants simply stop paying rent and therefore, in the case of Regency, had to take losses on increased bad debt expenses.

In the third quarter 2008 to 2009, receivables went from $-82 to $2,330. So container users went from prepaying $82k to now being $2.3 MM in arrears. hmmm

I wonder how much of this cash -- that has been booked as revenue, btw - will actually come in the door. I would suspect little, if any, of it.

This brings up the question: how does MINI treat bad debt expense? I hope someone brings up these questions on the call.

Assuming these monies aren't actually $$s MINI will see would mean a top line decline of 32.3% instead of the headline 30.6%. Both numbers are ugly.

My guess is that we saw a spike in receivables because, if accounted for properly, $2.3MM in revenue wasn't really revenue - it was bad debt. EPS would have been a miss, which is clearly unacceptable to MINI management.