PYX Resources: Achieving volume and diversification milestones. Watch the video here.
if you look at this in the context of the 'failure' of the open offer in October to raise anywhere near the 'upto ÂŁ900,000' that management wanted, then this raise makes sense and could, perhaps, have been anticipated.
They must have ambitions to deploy capital to fund growth and after the failure of the open offer to provide that capital, they've gone to a specialist to help them. I think I find that reassuring. It just means that management are operationally focused and will do whatever it takes to get the resources they need to get the business on the move. I guess management's view is that 'we', the retail mob, had our chance to support them properly at the open offer and didn't take it.
I share your confusion and frustration but disagree with your conclusion. I think the stock moves up strongly from now on.
The run-up to the placing held the stock back - now we know!. Wouldn’t surprise me if newsflow has been held back too because of the transaction, and that can now be released to the market in coming weeks.
The new holders have seen a pitchbook produced by the company and clearly think they can make very good money here, at an entry price of 6.5p. I suspect the smart thing to do is to buy not sell at these levels....
That’s an important piece of research by your group. If Unilever becomes involved that would mean India and emerging markets are really opening up. Phosphate still utterly dominates emerging market products so this would be a massive growth area for ITX.
I guess the logical extension of the RNS is that the company is now a clear bid target because of the potential value of the intellectual property assets, post today's announcement. I guess there might be rumours of a bid that we're not aware of and that's why the company has felt it had to react. Otherwise, the RNS does seem rather superfluous.
Endocrine assets are highly prized in the US. It's been a very difficult area for the big pharmas/biotechs to make any real progress on for years, despite the serious revenue opportunities. I do think this will be a target at some point but I guess not this week, judging from the 'modest' RNS.
agree with your maths, Jurado....there is a reference in the report to the use of debt to fund growth till break-even via a non-dilutive means. given the scale of the top-line and its growth, that would be more than realistic; the borrowing figure would be pretty low - single - digit millions. Oxford Biomedica have used balance sheet to get where they've got and their top-line is more precarious / less diversified than TRX. Like Sandhopper, I added a wee bit below 6p....
afternoon buying not strange if you take a look at the board and holders post the funding last summer - there's a lot of US money here...
If we get selling in the afternoon, that's when you should get worried.
US buying in the afternoon should give us all comfort that the Nouryon marketing agreement RNS is on its way. If we don't see it this week, I think it's then officially 'over-due' and that's a concern.
See article below from the EndPoints daily. I'm not sure whether to be pleased that we're in the potentially important exosome game, albeit behind players like Codiak; or to be disappointed that the Codiak collaboration has involved meaningful cash commitments, whereas ours appears to involve nothing until/unless there's a pre-clinical break-through. I still think it was the right decision not to burn more cash in attempting our own pre-clinical work...
Codiak CEO Doug Williams has notched his first collaboration deal.
The biotech exec and his team are collecting a $56 million upfront from Jazz Pharmaceuticals $JAZZ as Codiak ramps up 5 translational programs using its exosome platform, with two of the cancer targets in public sight — NRAS and STAT3. There’s another $20 million on the table for near-term preclinical goals, with a $200 million package of milestones per target and a royalty arrangement for success.
Just announced: Air Liquide takes a circa 20% stake in this Canadian peer to ITM. It’s yet more evidence that the industrial gas players are really seeing hydrogen as being central to a low carbon future and that the time to stop watching and get involved has come.
These big global industrial players have sat on the sidelines for a couple of decades whilst others burned through cash on R&D. They’re moving now because there’s proper money to be made....
maybe that's it...thanks...just shows that we're in a bear market for UK aim innovation companies, when a stock like this, with obvious catalysts and a chinese strategic investor can drop so easily...
this drift lower is a bit of a bore....
as discussed on this board last week, we're due some contract news from asia and some gib news, too....problem is that it's all too easy for the time-lines to slip ahead of signed deal terms, etc. for no fault of management's. We then get these air-pockets of no news which investors sell into - particularly when the macro environment is so febrile.
we should all be nibbling away at this one down here, but I suspect that the open offer brought a number of private investors up to their full position size in this stock, which just increases the chances of the no-news drift lower.
it only takes one gib RNS and we're well into double figures, although any asian licence contract news in membrane would actually be far more material for the long-term value of the business.... I've been waiting for gib since 2014. i've been waiting for it for so long that I'm going to fall off my chair in shock if it ever comes thru....
it's a really interesting therapeutic area and let's hope they get something on the shelf in IBS soon...note the agreement signed by competitor Vedanta Bioscience (owned by London listed PureTech) this week. 4D could do with more obvious validation from the big pharma community than they've attracted to date but I still think they're a global leading player in a great niche. gawd-knows what's going on in terms of trading today. it looks like somebody has got bored and let their computers sell down in a clumsy fashion. it certainly has the feel of a stock with overhang. I did pick up some more just now at 90p via H-L.....good luck!
Yep, you got the seller right. Well done....at least the buyer, Ferd, gives us all confidence.
We made it into the top five biotech news items today in Fiercebiotech, an influential daily US/global biotech newsletter:
“Novo Nordisk has enlisted e-therapeutics to support target discovery efforts at its recently-opened research center in Oxford, U.K. The collaboration will see e-therapeutics apply its platform for finding synergistic target combinations to a “specific area” of Type 2 diabetes.
E-therapeutics is built around a computer-based drug discovery platform that analyzes biological networks and the likely effect of drugs upon them. Rather than searching for single targets that alter disease pathways, e-therapeutics creates in-silico networks of protein interactions and looks for ways to disrupt the system that gives rise to the disease phenotype. This can yield multitarget strategies.
Novo, which like its peers is searching for an edge in the competitive diabetes market, has signed up to work with e-therapeutics on the application of the technology to Type 2 diabetes. The 12-month collaboration will seek to identify novel pathways and compounds for treating the disease.
The collaboration will support the early target discovery research now underway at Novo’s R&D site in Oxford. Novo committed to investing £115 million ($146 million) into the site over a 10-year period at the start of 2017. The site is located near to the University of Oxford’s Target Discovery Institute, giving Novo a source of starting points for drugs, and the e-therapeutics deal could complement this resource.
Under the terms of the agreement, Novo will reimburse e-therapeutics for its contributions to the collaboration and get an option to license any relevant IP generated by the project. The commercial terms of future licensing agreements will be mutually decided down the line, if required.
The outlay furthers Novo’s attempts to position itself for growth in the face of a challenging market for its core diabetes franchise. Some of the earlier attempts sought to move Novo beyond diabetes, but the e-therapeutics collaboration is intended to strengthen the Danish drugmaker’s position in its therapeutic heartland.
With e-therapeutics specializing in multitarget approaches, the deal echoes the way some of Novo’s rivals are trying to gain an edge in the diabetes sector. In May 2017, Sanofi tasked Exscientia with identifying pairs of targets involved in glucose control, NASH, weight management and other areas relevant to diabetics, plus generating bispecific small molecules capable of hitting both of them.
well, I'll take today's RNS as a real validation of the platform and management. Novo's R&D is highly respected and very focused. It's clearly NOT a licence deal but the precursor to one. Hence there's no big share price reaction to it. But, personally, it's a big relief. It shows that we are on the pitch and playing the game, even if we're not yet scoring goals. I hope/think we're now in a virtuous circle, where other pharma companies see this type of agreement and feel that they have something to lose and a lot to gain by signing up ETX to take a look at the early stage opportunities. For ETX, this is a scale game. The more interesting molecules/technologies they work on, the more chance of them partnering with a potential blockbuster. 7p ain't much to pay for exposure to this digital drug discovery theme.
ever since AZN ditched us, they've had nothing but failures across their respiratory programme. I can't recall one respiratory success of theirs....does make you wonder if they'll be back to partner on COPD..
A phase 2a trial of AstraZeneca’s AZD1419 has missed its primary endpoint. AstraZeneca moved the Dynavax-partnered TLR9 agonist into the trial in the belief it could improve time to loss of asthma control in patients with eosinophilic, moderate-to-severe forms of the disease.
nah! more likely a partial sell-down by invesco....there have been lots of management changes in various UK funds at Invesco and new managers quite often chuck-out legacy stuff they inherit. sometimes because they don't like it but more often because there's stuff they do want to buy and they need to sell kit to get the cash in to do so....
interesting to see if FERD have taken more stock....having a smart norgewgian family office keen to buy right up to 100p gives me a lot of confidence here. norwegians have faults but they know their fish....!
I've been here since 2016 so it has hurt. But i participated at 2p in decent size and that has helped average things out. to answer your question directly. yes, the original investment case still stands. I bought back then because i was convinced that global household and personal care companies (unilever, reckitts, J&J, l'oreal, etc) had under-invested in product technology over many years and the same was therefore true of the spec chemical companies that supplied them. the reasons for the under-investment are many but perhaps the most significant was that since the financial crisis these companies had been rewarded handsomely because of the quality/stability of their earnings.
Therefore senior managements spent more time on balance sheet manipulation to give earnings growth/stability rather than taking risk with product innovation and they were very well rewarded for that (look at buy-backs, debt issuance, etc. in this sector).
At some point, innovation, spurred by sustainability needs, was going to kick in and ITX was a very clever niche provider of solutions that these companies would need. Of course, ITX Investors and management believed it would happen more quickly than it has and we've paid the price for it. Even the demerger at Akzo Nobel last year was unfortunate for ITX, so there was a bit of bad luck in the mix, too.
however, we're here, now, and i'm comfortable that this new management team are very focused and very well incentivised to get things right. I'm happy to sit here for your three years and see where the share price is at....
agreed. great thread. I think the point that non-holders haven't yet appreciated is that once your product enters into a complex supply-chain in this household and personal care space it really doesn't come out of it for decades - and I mean decades.
if something is working and its reliable and it's not harming brand, etc then it stays because the big household product names are so risk averse. Now, every few decades there will be a reason to force change in formulation. In this instance, it's because of phosphates and sustainability agendas. You can attach a high multiple to the earnings that build on any of these ITX agreements because they're so sticky and will endure for so long. If/when the Nouryon is announced, I think it completely de-risks ITX and is highly significant. I think the move from 2p to 5p is about this business avoiding going bust; i think the value of these deals in terms of future cashflow hasn't started to be discounted into share price yet.
The reason why we're down here at 4/5p from 50/60/70p is because the whole process of adoption has taken several years longer than anybody thought and they simply ran out of cash. The comfort that I take from that saga is that this represents such a significant barrier to entry for others that they won't try. Final point: Asia hasn't even started to switch to phosphate-free product yet. Good luck all!
I used to be a stockbroker. I’ve seen the movie before!
Am hoping for more newsflow v soon ( I actually quite like the idea of a merger with C4X, too. But am getting carried away, I suspect).
yes, interesting...it could be griffiths..a couple of big trades have gone thru in another of his names, Synairgen...
Today, there appears to be some general deck-chair shuffling going on in the UK innovation space. Note that IP Group is having its best day for months today after two big clear-out? trades early this morning.
As you say, anything to clear an overhang is good. The bull in me would argue that ETX will have held back good news until they get the overhang cleared because otherwise any spike in share price would be sold into aggressively. So, if this has cleared the decks, the company is now more likely to be on the front-foot with newsflow.