Here is the latest Business View column by James Penn of Thomas Miller Investment in the Isle of Man.

Rolls Royce corporate announcements have in recent years been the occasion for excitement and often, indeed, fireworks.

Its shares have fallen by mid double digits on five occasions over the last three years in the wake of profit warnings.

This year’s full year results were in contrast relatively benign, with a (by historic comparison) modest 4 per cent fall in the share price after the company announced a fall in underlying profits from £1.4bn to £813m, though there was a huge headline loss due to the recent £700m bribery fines, and £4.4bn loss on the company’s hedge book.

Rolls also forecast that 2017 profit will be only slightly better than 2016.

This column considered the outlook for the company just over a year ago, in November 2015.

This was after the last of the five warnings, at which time the shares stood at £5.50.

The shares have rallied since then, and currently stand at just under £7.

But the stock market has recovered strongly too, so to some extent the bounce is generic rather than particular to Rolls.

Much of it has to do with economic improvement and a bottoming in oil and commodity markets, rather than an operational improvement on the part of the company.

However, Warren East, the new CEO who replaced John Rishton in 2015, does seem to be doing the right things.

The company is well into a £200m cost cutting exercise, which should be completed by the end of this year.

It also seems to have simplified and improved its reporting mechanism (over-bureaucratic management levels were a source of some of the previous problems, a classic instance of too many cooks spoiling the broth).

It has been difficult at times to fathom quite how Rolls has managed to make quite such a mess of things since 2013.

So many advantages seemed to have been thrown at it: a big secular upturn in the civil aerospace market, a huge order book, plenty of help from governments.

What has been missing has been execution.

In East, the company appears to have the man (still fairly young, strong-willed, experienced, an engineering background).

While the near term profit outlook isn’t brilliant, there is scope to beat management’s low expectations, and further out a big improvement in profitability should be possible if all goes according to plan..

Attention will now move towards a large ramp up of Trent XWB engines, for the new Airbus A350XWB.

Deliveries of Trent engines are forecast to rise from 300 per annum to 600 by 2021, in what has been billed as the biggest upswing in engine manufacture since the end of the Second World War.

The company has invested massively in recent years to facilitate this, making large improvements to worker productivity in order to be able to achieve the targets.

Rolls stands to be one of the main beneficiaries of the Japanese and German machine tool manufacturers, whose CNC machines can achieve in a tenth of the time what a skilled lathe operator would have turned out in the past.

Sitting on the ’sunlit uplands’ of the future is £1bn of annual free cash flow, once the installed engine base is in position, and the company can collect the maintenance and servicing revenues associated with them.

Modest improvements in the other problem divisions - power systems, marine, and nuclear - should also help.

Investors are now hoping that Warren East can be for Rolls Royce what Eddie Jones has been for the England rugby team: same players, slightly different structure, but a different manager, and hopefully now on to a winning streak.

However, this is by no means given and the final proof will be what the company delivers down the line.

The opinions stated are those of the author and should not be taken as investment advice. Any recommendations may not be suitable for all, so please contact your financial adviser for further guidance. The value of investments can go down as well as up.