Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
The RNS today says a lot - offers of 40 pence per share for the company! Having bought in at the start of the Tungsten journey at £2.25 it sounds like the journey s nearly over
Any one attend the company update yesterday? I could not attend so wondered if anything material on forecasts for the Amazon tie-up. Also on how they came to require such a large settlement for an HR matter in the US
At this rate of decline the Tungsten socks the staff got will be worth more than the stock!!!
There seems to be no end to the misery in this stock. I listened in to the half year update and you could hear the nervousness in Rick's delivery. In my view there is a real core problems with the company that I am not sure can be easily recovered from at this late stage:
Despite the (re)launch of a number of products, fundamentally the market has moved on from e-invoicing to full procure to pay and Tungsten has fell behind. The services that Tungsten have for procurement (PO distribution; acknowledgement) don't manage the procurement process like Ariba and Coupe do. The workflow tool that Tungsten purchased to process the invoices once received is fairly niche and is not as feature rich as SAP products which is what the majority of target multinationals use.
Why have they been left behind? Well, for the 18 months prior to being sold OB10 focused on getting the company ready for sale and then for the following 5 years the focus has been on financing the invoices and not on where the market was going - 7 years with your eye off the ball is a disaster. Meanwhile the competition moved on. Tungsten employees used to laugh at Tradeshift. Tradeshift doubled down and have created a well funded global company with a vibrant ecosystem of services and have gained the investment required to do this whilst staying private. Coupa has grown considerably and taken itself public.
I think the market was hoping that Tungsten may end up in a trade sale and that Tradeshift was a potential purchaser, just for the customer base. Tradeshift's bid for Basware would seem to have taken this off the table and left Tungsten with an out of date product suite, relatively stagnant organic growth (especially when compared to others), but it does have a core blue chip customer base.
What's needed is an experienced turnaround team to lead this floundering company in the right direction and soon. I have written my shares off in my mind, but I hope for the sake of the general staff that someone can smell the coffee and make the changes at the top that are so badly needed. Mr Chairman, your time is short....
Big sigh!!! I had hoped that getting to 60 would get us to a new floor, but seems to have been a ceiling instead. On more relevant news, Kevin Wilbur (Senior Vice President, AP Automation) who was part of the senior team has left the company. Not sure of the impact - the Workflow sales which he was responsible for seems to have been the majority of new buyer activity
I wonder what the justification is for Rick getting £1.3 million in remuneration last year??? Incredible that he got £418K in bonus and they gave staff a pair of socks each (I kid you not....!)
Anyone got views on the high-level results published today. Seems to be some good news on the invoice financing side, but less so on the core invoicing business in terms of new buyers, especially in the last 6 months. Also, the cash position has gone from 17.1 to 6.4 in the 12 months, with the second half burn greater than the first half by almost a million (�4.9 & �5.8 respectively). Presume this is the one-off costs rolling out, but I hope that this now stops so that a cash call is not required.
.... share price on 10th April 2017; 55p and the share price 12 months later... 55p. I am sure I am not the only shareholder hoping for some stellar results to come from the end-of-year trading update in the next couple of weeks. What are peoples expectations? I'd certainly like to see EBITDA positive numbers for the last couple of months of the trading year as promised in the 6 month update. What about others?
Press release today about launching an analytics service for the supplier community (http://www.tungsten-network.com/press-releases/2018-tungsten-network-extends-analytics-offering-to-accounts-receivable/) - hope this is a better performer than the buyer side which does not seem to have generated any revenue
It would depend on whether the agreement with Tungsten was on a recourse or no-recourse basis. In the early days the agreements were all no-recourse so if the invoicee (Carillion in your example) failed, Tungsten would incur the loss as there was no-recourse to the supplier. Given their mix of finance sources there may now be a mixture of the two. This was one of the reasons why the available pool of invoices that could be financed was less than the face value of the invoices processed across the network (however, the main ones for this were the lack of invoice status and supplier country)
I agree it is an odd phrase as it has a double meaning. In the context of Tungsten Invoice Finance it means the face value of invoices that have been financed at a point in time that are yet to be settled - i.e. they have pushed money to suppliers and the settlement is outstanding. The number will always be volatile because of their short duration so you have new invoices being financed and previously financed ones being paid off at high frequency so you should look at this as a high-water mark for their financing service.
andrewdbl Not disputing any of this; just saying it would be nice to see the BOD buy in at this current price to show that they have confidence in both the full year results and the plans for this FY That's it. Personally I am neutral as to the future of this stock. In my view it could go either way depending on this years performance.
Be nice to see one or more of the BOD make a substantial purchase to demonstrate belief that the results were positive and they have belief in the company to deliver +EBITDA this FY
See T have enabled US SME's to access credit lines through a tie up with BlueVine http://www.tungsten-network.com/press-releases/2017-tungsten-network-and-bluevine-unveil-partnership-to-offer-us-small-medium-sized-businesses-fast-access-to-lines-of-credit/?id=20315
Just seen this - http://www.businessinsider.com/hsbc-partners-with-fintech-tradeshift-on-financing-product-2017-3?r=UK&IR=T The space is clearly hotting up with the likes of HSBC partnering up now to get their slice of the e-invoice financing pie
Wow; a single big 4.3M share trade yesterday at a mid-point price - presuming an institutional deal
They have also previously announced the opportunities that Brazil and Mexico presented, but to my knowledge have not secured any significant revenue from these markets. Perhaps this is because they have not put their own people on the ground - hopefully lessons learned and they embrace this Indian opportunity more aggressively. Just having a capability does not guarantee success - this needs to be aggressively prosecuted.
Wow; that must have been some hard yards as they started down this track a couple of years ago and announced partial compliance / approval at the beginning of June 2015 https://www.tungsten-network.com/press-releases/2015-tungsten-network-one-step-closer-to-pan-india-launch/?id=1186
These guys continue to make significant waves in this market segment: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170308005469/en/Tradeshift-Acquires-IBX-Business-Network-Create-Worlds They used to be miles behind Tungsten, but now seem to have blazed a trail and are disappearing into the distance (unfortunately out in front). Come on Tungsten; lets have some good news from you
I know there is no answer to this "But what the .... is going on with this share price". It seems to almost have a life of its own on the strength of no news at all. There has been nothing positive and nothing negative in the last few weeks and we are only 8 weeks away from year-end and yet we have gone from high fifties to low seventies and back again....... My nerves are shot!!!