Kingspan shareholders must be rueing the day that their board decided to expand into the United States and spent a $120 million on the Tate flooring business.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Kingspan seems to have bought a very expensive pup with Tate and shareholders have every right to expect detailed explanations about what went wrong with Kingspan's biggest ever acquisition - a deal that was supposed to catapult Kingspan into a world leader in the international flooring business.

It seems hardly conceivable that such a vast sum of money was spent on a company without absolute guarantees that orders in the order book were hard and fast. How Kingspan agreed to buy Tate without these order guarantees will need to be explained in detail when the group's results are published in a few weeks.

Instead of $200 million revenues this year, Tate will be lucky to achieve even one-quarter of that level of sales. Credibility seems to be at stake for the Kingspan management. Davy's Florence O'Donoghue did not mince his words when he said in a note that last week's profits warning was the third time that the broker has had to reduce its forecasts for Tate since the acquisition.