ET thoughts16 Aug 2015 12:51
Http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2015-08-14/edi-truell-wants-a-national-infrastructure-club
Lastly, and turning to one of your other ventures, the supply-chain financing venture you founded, Tungsten Corporation, has lately become a target of short-sellers. Are you still confident in the business' prospects?
After a lifetime in private equity, I can’t say I am overly enamoured with the stock market. We floated the business, but got hit by a really aggressive band of short-sellers. I have been badly advised, I think. I was advised to say nothing and carry on, but they have been putting out some really scurrilous stuff on blogs and so on. The share-price has been really really driven down. To an extent I could say, ‘so what’? I think the business is sound and will prosper. But it certainly causes lots of disruption to the staff, to customers, which has been a bit sort of annoying.
So don’t expect to see me on the stock market again in the near future. I have a lot of other businesses within Disruptive Capital Finance [an investment partnership Truell shares] and right now, if any of them came to me and said, ‘let’s float’, I’d say: ‘Do you want to go and lie down in a dark room until the feeling goes away’.
I said, quite publicly, that we would spend a ton of money on a global roll-out. So the company posted a £25 million loss, what I call a reassuringly large loss. If you invest in India, where we managed to persuade the Indian government to change the law to allow invoice-financing, that costs a lot of money and that comes off the bottom line. In my accounting, that is fairly reflected, and so you get a loss. But people say, ‘you are losing a lot of money and so this is a dreadful business’. The short-sellers have deliberately represented it in this way.
The right thing to do is build the business. I have strengthened the management, brought in a couple of new people to lead the firm. I just put up another couple of million myself, so I really hope it works.
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