Member Info for 30silver

Hey @Bagpuss - I'll dig it out, I made the reference in one of my previous posts, from memory it's in the Risk Register section within the annual report, and there's also a reference to a CHP project in there too I believe.

@Damay - The process is the majority of it, there's also a power supply related capacity constraint which they still haven't told us they've sorted. Yield can increase all they like but if they can't turn on the furnace they had delivered early this year they can't get to the capacity levels needed to reach break even.

"Quite Unique" - really? They do have extremely limited competition, i.e. CTE Carbon Composites (subsidiary of Taiwanese co), Midlands Brakes (doesn't look serious) and Brembo. Brembo produce CCBD's through their JV "Brembo SGL Carbon" - funnily enough SGL Carbon is where the current ST COO - Stephen Easton spent 16 years before joining ST. What I don't get, is why Brembo who are worth approximately €3Billion don't just dip into their pockets (last accounts show a pre-tax earnings of over £300m) and snap up what appears to be their only competitor and take all of those future contracts in-house?

Surely the next update has to be on financing / capacity? We all know what the trading situation looks like - absolute dogsh*t until they get the volumes up to the break even level and they can't get there until the new furnace is online - STILL NO UPDATE ON THIS SINCE APRIL!!!

FWIW I think they still haven't unlocked the production capacity (total capacity as opposed to quality issue with scrappage / yield) and once they get that sorted at least there'll be a path to cash flow generation.

The newest furnace still isn't online (despite them saying the blockers to it had been cleared back in the late spring / early summer - I can't find the specific text but it was something planning / building related with the landlord I think). Once it is we must be looking at production capacity of £30m+ up from the £15-20m now and therefore cashflow generation? Either that or it's wishful thinking on my part - it's equally likely at this stage. GLA and DYOR.

It's definitely cheap, but given the price history even recently I don't see a majority accepting anything below 1.5 or even 2p - why crystallise a loss at this point? How much can the big holders have averaged down to?

@Laura what makes you think there's going to be financing news next week? I'm sure that there's more than half of the £13.2m loan left - did you read somewhere how much they'd drawn over and above the £3.4m from the interims?

There'll need to be some serious progress made somewhere for that to happen in any meaningful way. I averaged down this week, but I'm now stuck with approximately 7.3 million shares at an average of just under 1p per share - guess I'll just have to hope that they finally get their s**t together or it's going to be a painful loss.

It certainly looks like they have made a "city" Chairman, and after the bumbling buffoon that was Bundred, hopefully it will bring some stability and investor focus to the board. It might be too soon for him to get his head under the bonnet before the interims are produced - but I'm really keen to see what his take will be.

I'm piecing together some snippets of information from recent releases and I think I've found part of the underlying problem - they're short of power on site. Page 5 of the Annual Report (ESG section) states that "installation of the proposed combined heat and power plant (“CHP”), will have a further dramatic impact on gas demand" and then CHP is mentioned again on page 25, in the Risks section under "Energy" with the risk being identified as "Risk of production

disruptions or increased costs due to the inability to secure sufficient energy supplies locally to meet the Company’s intensive production requirements" and the mitigation being "Progress combined heat and power (CHP) plant solutions and other energy-efficient technologies".

I'm not sure how implementing a CHP solution would reduce their gas demand (Page 5) but then I saw that one of the vesting criteria of the new(ish) LTIPs was "A commercially confidential strategic milestone providing additional technical excellence, aimed at maintaining the Company's technical leadership in the marketplace (20% of the award)". Could this be linked to the project, reducing gas demand (environmentally friendly - the first mention of CHP was in the ESG section) and also producing power that they can't get from the grid (identified as a key risk warranting inclusion in the risk register)? We've been told many times that there is a furnace to be installed in 2024 but that it's been delayed time after time without any clear information as to why - FWIW I think that it's because they're waiting on this CHP project. There was a comment in one of the updates about an issue regarding the site being resolved, but no update that the new capacity is online, so we have to assume that the furnace is still on site somewhere, gathering dust.

You can have all of the yield gains you like (Bundred's parting statement) but without an increase in production capacity from new furnaces coming online the company won't be profitable or cash generative and they'll have to come back to the market for another raise, and IMHO that should cost Maddock her job, if not Johnson and potentially (but this would be extreme) Easton theirs too.

I wouldn't put too much credence on having conversations with the Chairman - I don't think he's even remotely close to the details on this one, likely couldn't find his @rse in the bath with both hands. Let's see what the interims reveal about the more up to date cash position and forecast for the rest of the year. The last RNS suggested that this will be in September - does anyone have anything more concrete than that?

I suppose I'd ask why a person would come on a board and only talk negatively (sometimes baselessly) about a company unless they were trying to push the stock price down? If you're trying to push a price down you're either shorting the stock, looking to buy in at a cheaper price in the future, or you're just bitter that maybe you lost money on the stock and now you're acting out of spite.

@pokerchips thanks for that - I’ve still only got part of the picture, only once the June results are out will we know just how much of the 100% increase in production rates is sitting in debtors. At £1.5-2M per month sales, doubled recently if the OEM’s are taking their customary 45-60 days to pay, this could lead to between £1m to £2m being tied up in debtors, temporarily. Scaling up production levels will always chew up working capital in the beginning, especially in building material stocks and in debtors - but it’s not cash burn. It’s still an issue to manage but if there is an additional £2M in debtors (let’s leave stock for now, but they could do with an integrated trade / Invoice financing facility to manage working capital better) then the picture isn’t as bad as you make out.

Time will tell, all eyes on mid-September when they will announce the Interims, and provide a fuller update on the FY24 outlook and most importantly a progress update on FY25 production capacity.

If they've spent half the placing in 2 months that would be serious - where are you getting those figures from? I didn't see a cash balance / burn rate being reported, please show where that's from - it'll stop many investors getting burned if they have all of the facts.

Hey @15LIVES - thanks for the comment. I wasn't involved in / close to the Air Products issue, but it certainly set the cause back quote a way (along with Energos, Outotec, Envirofusion, Enerj8 the list goes on). AP was probably the highest profile failure due to it's size, from what I recall they had a c.1TPH test unit working well, then tried to scale massively (up to something like 1,000 tonnes per day and got something very, very wrong on the thermodynamics, melted a hole in the side of one of the reactors you could drive a car through (this might be urban legend but it was a widespread story at the time). They lost over $900m on the project and it basically gave Gasification / Pyrolysis a horrific reputation.

In almost every single application I've seen fail, it has been the ability to deal with problematic feedstocks that has been at the heart of the issue. Whether that's clinker formation from low ash-melt point plastics, Hydrogen Chrloride formation from PVC in the feedstock or failure to maintain steady reactor temperature because of variable moisture content, CV or fraction size. It's always about the fuel, and test plants with carefully curated feedstocks will fool those who haven't seen the problems, but they won't fool anyone who knows what they're looking at. For a true test you should allow someone to bring 168 hours worth of their own waste, do a supervised pre-screen to remove any seriously out of spec material, then run the plant for 24 hours per day for 7 days straight. That will show that the kit actually works.

Not been on this board for a while so thought I'd check in! Great to see the testing unit arrived and in situ, that said RefGas had one in from (I think) the mid 2010's and Pyrocore also had one running in Wells (now in Avonmouth) and I've physically been to both and seen the units running. The issue to overcome, if you're expecting anyone to actually use their own (or borrowed) money to buy one of these units, is that they need operational running data, not sporadic short term tests. I know this for a fact as I spent 5 years trying to get comfortable with Gasification and/or Syngas for a specific project in the UK, only to revert back to rotary kiln incineration as neither of the "ATT" processes were capable of dealing with the heterogeneity of the feedstock at such small (up to 10 tonnes per day) volumes.

What PHE need to do is put this unit, on a free issue basis (or for a share of the equity in an SPV) into a commercial operation that will run 7,500 - 8,000 hours per annum, otherwise they're wasting their time "proving" anything. This is from my own direct experience looking at this technology over the last 10 years.

Also WHY IS THERE NO OPTION TO EDIT A POST?

@UER84 - hit the nail on the head there, either that or they're just trying to goad the gullible ones into falling for their ramping / deramping. Most of their supposed insight into what the stock will do is based purely on sentiment (or even worse, hidden "patterns") and never about the fundamentals. The SCE fundamentals are improving, there's a significant lift in production capacity coming (whenever they get this furnace online, we're being consistently promised it'll be 2024, so they'd better not miss that deadline) and once that is bedded in, then I think a positive trading update will come (I suspect immediately once the figures are confirmed as opposed to waiting for the usual timetable) and this stock will re-rate back to north of 3p, to get to 5p+ I still think that there needs to be a major step up in profitability, likely at a run rate of £5m+ EBITDA per annum to justify the £65m+ market cap that would give.

@Al180 - thanks for the info, I've no idea how that valuation was justified, but I think the market will be a little more cautious going forward. That said the order book position is almost unheard of, and given the limited competition (hopefully the technical barriers to entry will keep the Chinese out) ST is in an incredibly strong position, we just need to see progress on building the production capacity, and for that capacity to be effectively and efficiently delivered.

I think if you factor in the additional number of shares in issue (there are 3 times more shares in issue than there were 3 months ago) then the price you're looking at would be 2.6p to 3.3p if you're comparing back to 8p-10p.

Do people actually believe this sh*t?

I can see it pushing back up once the profit-taking pressure eases, but to get to a £60m+ market cap we're going to need to see more than a bit of good news, we need to see the £50M turnover capacity installed, and profitability / cash generation being delivered. I can see this happening inside 12 months, but there's a LOT of actual work that needs to happen first, I don't see "market sentiment" creating a 5-bagger from the last listing price (I'd love it if that did happen, but I'm not holding my breath).