Member Info for BoringBernie

Mintid

No-one can definitively say "Yes" to your main question. As it says at https://www.fruitflowplus.com/faqs/ in response to the Qu :-

Is there any proof that daily consumption of Fruitflow®+Omega-3 reduces heart attacks or strokes?

Ans :-

Long-term studies of the effects of Fruitflow® usage in the general population will be needed to obtain a body of data which can be analysed to show whether Fruitflow® consumption is linked to a reduction in risk or incidence of heart attack and stroke.

However other dietary antiplatelet agents such as fish oil, which has similar effects on platelet function to Fruitflow®, have been shown to be associated with reduction in CVD-related events in some studies. Similar findings could be expected for Fruitflow®.

*****

I expect there to be some proof at some time, but for the moment, it seems likely to me as a layman, but not certain.

As for buying it, the two main places I'm aware of to buy it in the UK are online, either buying Provexis' own product at

https://www.fruitflowplus.com/

or Healthspan's product at

https://www.healthspan.co.uk/circulease-with-150mg-of-fruitflow/

The former also contains Omega 3, so useful if he's considering that as a supplement too whereas the latter also contains Potassium, which is useful for blood pressure support. On the off chance he's a Vegan, the former won't be appropriate.

As well as the vague comms from Ford, I'd say what's holding is back is a justifiable ( ? ) cynicism on the scale of the opportunity that ByHealth presents.

Those of us long enough in the tooth to remember the EFSA rulings and our initial tie up with DSM were going to bring riches our way and we justifed that by looking at the size of the market ( massive ) , picking a small % and working out how many millions were going to take FF every day. Hell, I did such calculations myself, and yet we were wrong. Alf will rightly point out that Rome wasn't built in a day and it was always going to take time, but here we are, selling ~ a million GBP of product a year.

Is China and ByHealth different enough to justify thinking it's going to be much better than what DSM ( who also spent a lot on trying to open the market up ) managed ? I believe it could be, and should certainly be different enough to justify a re-rating in the share price. But is it going to be as huge as what some people on a ByHealth related bulletin board think ? Probably not, but there's a chance it is.

BB

My first thought was that's not a bad synopsis that grok has come up with.

Then I saw it had a re-rating of market cap to between 10 and 20 million GBP. Give it's currently 13 million, it seems that bit of what AI has come up, demonstrates some improvement is needed in the Intelligence part of the algorithms.

It's not directly relevant, but I did smile when I read

"The £191k decrease in underlying operating loss also included a £24k increase in research, patent and trade mark costs, resulting from (i) the gut microbiome patent going into the national stage, and (ii) some additional trade mark expenditure in a key territory." which is fair enough, but the increase in admin costs of roughly 20k didn't get a mention, nor did the increase in Ian's remuneration of roughly 10% ( to be fair, that's mostly inflation related ), and though the reduction in operating losses was highlighted, you have to read the report properly to see that the underlying cash flow situation was worse than the previous year.

Highlighting the good over the not so good is par for the course for all companies, and especially so for loss making companies, but it does show you really need to read everything to get a fuller picture.

Interestingly, it looks like O'Kennedy has drastically reduced her hours

I do agree with Gixer that orders from ByHealth ( or big orders from anywhere ) will be game changers and, at that point, no-one will be remotely arsed how much Ford is being paid or the spin used in highlighting the positives over the negatives.

Given the improvement in Gross Margin, I still think we'll need to be hitting consistent revenue in excess of 1.5 million to be round about break even level. So long as we still have a decent margin on large volumes sold to ByHealth then that'll be the game changer when/if it happens. Though it'll bring a nice problem to have because of cash flow.

BB

Also ... given we started paying a smaller % royalty to DSM as of 1st Jan 2025, it's probably reasonable to assume our current GM is in the lower to mid 40% range ?

So, for example, if we've just paid our supplier 500k for our recent order, that might generate up to about 900k worth of sales.

Given our cash position and what we've been told about revenue in H1 ( which wasn't much ) and likely revenue in Q3 ( which was a lot better ), that feels about right

BB

Sphinx

The overall GM for both revenue streams in 2024/25 was ~41%. We know that FF+ has historically had a GM of between 65 and 70%, so the trailing Gross Margin for FF itself was likely to be 38 or 39% ?

We have a handle on the liabilities front which give an indication of what we owe DSM for the royalty, so it looks like our underlying GM on FF without royalties might be, plus or minus a few %, in the low 50's ?

Plainly each order that goes out could well be sold at a different margin depending on who the customer is and how much they're taking, so it's not an exact science, but I'm pretty confident on my numbers here.

BB

On the plus side, the Gross Margin on FF is better than I'd anticipated at this stage.

We already knew all this, but overall, results for 2024/25 were good, with H1 being very good and H2 being average.

H1 for 2025/26 was poor, though if you've run out of stock, that's not surprising. Q3 looks average to good, so a lot will depend on how Q4 turns out.

Multiple manufacturing runs suggests to me we're having to manage cashflow issues, because it'd almost certainly be cheaper per kg to have one or two larger runs. Thankfully the going concern section still talks about previous support on equity raises being a factor, so Ford must think that's still an option. Though you'd think now would be a good time to raise funds via equity, so I suspect the bigger players aren't overly keen on parting with their cash until ByHealth get the nod in China, so it looks like Ford will be continuing to spin plates to keep us going for a while yet.

Overall, not as bad as it could have been, but not brilliant either.

BB

Alf

Actually, they didn't tell us the finances were stable, that's your inference from what was said. I'd day we were financially stable in FY 2024/25, but not so much since then.

They told us we had ~700k in cash as of the end of March and that total sales ( so including FF+ ) for H1 2025/26 were roughly 350k, so about half of the previous H1. Which means a loss of > 100k for H1 2025/26, possibly quite a bit more, appears to be nailed on.

Add in the cost of the latest production and that starting point of cash of about 700k is likely to have been whittled down quite a lot.

Obviously I've been wrong before, but, even taking into account the improved margins on FF due to us having to give less of it to DSM, we can't be looking too healthy cash wise, so conjecture re cash flow and funding seems reasonable to me.

Slam

While I agree Ford should have specifically told us about the change of auditor and when and why it happened he's under no obligation under the AIM rules to tell us that, so it's a "should" rather than a "must". Far as I know, it doesn't require an EGM either, but I may be wrong about that.

That's fair, I was ignoring delisting because there's a formal process for it.

But things like "waiting until we get our hands on our FF order", "Trying to raise cash", "Negotiations with larger shareholders which may lead to a bid" are all things which could be being discussed with the auditors relating to any possible going concern issues.

It would, for example, be incredibly naive to expect Ford to say that one or more of our larger shareholders were negotiating to either take part in a placing or negotiating on taking us private. Companies generally only tell shareholders that in an RNS when substantiated rumours come out ( as opposed to unsubstantiated conjecture ).

Put simply, Ford chose not to tell us.

Gixer

While that's theoretically true, the reason for the delay was so vague that you could argue he didn't really give a real reason.

Saying "The Company continues to work with its new auditors, RPG Crouch Chapman LLP, in their first year as the Group's auditor, to ensure that the audit of the Accounts is completed as soon as possible. " told us absolutely nothing about why the auditors were still working on it. All of the reasons discussed on here recently fall neatly enough under "continues to work ... etc".

The issue isn't really about being lied to, the issue is the lack of transparency about why the auditors are/were still chugging away on it.

Alf

Yea, until we're truly cash flow positive, we're in a risky situation and our cashflow recently looks better than it really is because we bought FF from DSM for equity.

Orders in H2 and Q3 aren't awful, but they're not wonderful either which makes us vulnerable to either a dilutive placing or a lowball offer.

Hopefully those are worse case scenarios and we're worrying unnecessarily, but the lack of meaningful information from Ford about the delay in publishing the accounts leaves, not for the first time, an information vacuum ...

BB

Alf

Aye, it's mostly out of the company's control. However, I'd still question how we got into the situation where the delivery was presumably due in August when we knew quite some time ago that we were running out of stock.

Again, that's might not be Ford's fault, but he's the Chief Exec so it's his job to sort it.

Also, as I hinted at the other day, are our larger shareholders still prepared to support the company and, if they are, how come it hasn't happened ? If a placing had gone through we'd likely have had enough cash in the bank to cover us for >= 12 months and I doubt we'd be in our current position.

So, we wait ...

BB

I think Alf is right in that auditing the accounts themselves is unlikely to be an issue and, by inference, that suggests that the auditors, so far at least, won't sign us off as a Going Concern.

Re. The Auditor change

Thanks for digging that out Gixer. None of us know the reasons for us changing our auditors. For example ... it might be due to a technicality, it might be down to our old auditors no longer being price competitive or there might have been something in the books they weren't comfortable with.

All we know is that Ford has chosen not to tell us, which isn't that unusual on AIM but doesn't really inspire confidence.

Hopefully ByHealth will get the go-ahead soon in China, we'll be upping production to cope with that and moving into profit to put this uncertainty behind us, but at the moment, though there is still grounds for optimism, a degree of cynicism is needed too.

Hopefully, when the report comes out, words similar to "Considering the success of previous fundraisings ..." will still be there in the Going Concern section.

Sphinx

I won't go through the guesses I made again ( they're in my posting history from earlier this year ) on how much income the DSM inherited Stock would generate, but, be honest, we've got a bit more ( ~100k ? ) from that inventory than I'd guessed, so those numbers feel ball park right to me.

I'm much more concerned about what appears to be a last minute change of auditors, which makes me wonder if we couldn't get the accounts signed of as a going concern by Shipley's. If that's the case, then it's squeaky bum time from tomorrow for ( probably ) a couple of weeks while after we go into suspension.

On the plus side, we havn't been immediately suspended, so we can trade today.

BB

Https://www.provexis.com/shareholder-information/our-advisers/ has now been updated to reflect our recent change of auditors.

I didn't prompt Ian to do so, but I guess someone did.

Well, sadly, this is a shambles.

A 2 month delay on the delivery of FF may not be our fault, but it was obvious the stock was needed, why was it left so long in the first place ?

Also, we're told in a roundabout way that we've changed auditors. That happens sometimes, but it appears to be very recent because as I type this, https://www.provexis.com/shareholder-information/our-advisers/ still shows Shipley's as our auditors.

It'll likely sort itself out over the next couple of weeks, but it doesn't inspire confidence and the numbers so far for this FY highlight how dependent we are on ByHealth.

BB