Troubled Australian surfwear company Billabong International, in a do-or-die attitude, will embark on a four-year restructuring plan to help tide up and hopefully keep afloat the company even as it opened its books to second-time suitor TPG Capital.

Launa Inman, newly seated chief executive of the iconic brand, said that for the next four years, the debt-laden surfwear chain will cut product lines as it minimises the number and shutdowns its physical stores, while working to strengthen its online business and delivery.

All these business simplification strategies are meant to aid the company recover from a $275.6 million loss, its first annual loss since 2001. Four years from now, or on 2016, Ms Inman projected a $155 million in EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation), bigger by 2 1/2 times over last year's pro-forma EBITDA of $84 million.

"Billabong is a great company (but) there remains a lot of hard work ahead of us to return the Billabong Group to its former position," Ms Inman said.

Ms Inman said the number of Billabong's product styles would be slashed by 15 per cent in 2012. if successful, another 15 per cent will be staved off.

"We have more than 25,000 styles we produce on an annual basis," Ms Inman said. "What shocked me most was that we identified 34 per cent of our styles give us 1 per cent of our sales."

But analysts and industry observers remained wary of the plan.

"Whether the plan is enough to stave off TPG, I have my doubts. My concern now is that TPG walks away," Beulah Capital Portfolio Manager Tom Elliott told Reuters News.

"If you want a bid to go ahead, you make it happen. If you don't, you obfuscate and stall and produce alternative plans, as they are doing," he pointed out.

Private equity firm TPG Capital is currently doing due diligence on Billabong, after a A$694 million or $1.45-a-share takeover offer in July. Its earlier offer, submitted five months earlier, was higher but still knocked down by Gordon Merchant, founder and biggest shareholder of the troubled surfwear retailer.

The profit decline was a tremendous fall compared from the $119.1 million net profit the company reported in 2010/11.

Excluding one-off items, net profit was $33.5 million, on the back of a 7.9 per cent fall in revenue to $1.55 billion, the company said.

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