The vice president of marketing was less skeptical. He said that with lower costs at Merseyside Works, Victoria Chemicals might be able to take business from the plants of competitors such as Saone-Poulet or Vaysol. In the current severe recession, competitors would fight hard to keep customer, but sooner or later the market would revive, and it would be reasonable to assume that any lost business volume would return at that time.
Greystock had listened to both the director and the director and vice president and chose to reflect no charge for a loss of business at Rotterdam in his preliminary analysis of the Merseyside project. He told Morris:
Cannibalization really isn’t a cash flow; there is no check written in this instance. Anyway, if the company starts burdening its cost-reduction projects with fictitious charges like this, we’ll never maintain our cost competitiveness. A cannibalization charge is rubbish!