Member Info for CherBayer

That does seem to be the form of the new chair (Tom Crawford). The company has slashed costs, stopped the multi-year tar pit next gen product development that gained no traction and just ran over and over, increased recurring support revenue and is suddenly a year away from being debt free.

Exactly what form that buy will take, couldn't guess. Hang up a For Sale sign and see if a bigger company wants it? Perhaps one of the bigger companies that dumped entirely their previous gen automation software and now realise that actually there's still quite a lot of demand for that? Perhaps Kestrel or similar will simply buy more shares and reach the option of just buying the whole company and take it private as a steady income for the next decade.

Someone just bought everything on offer in the 15 pence range and ploughed on into 16 pence. There are certainly some people out there expecting another significant jump up. If the company can hold it together enough over the next year or so t pay down that remaining debt and (at that point) start seeing a few millions pounds a year of cash left over... Well, I don't know what the "right" market cap is for a company of less than a hundred people finding themselves holding three million pounds at the end of each year with no debt and everyone already paid, but it's a lot more than the current cap. Not very long ago the cap was less than ten million, and I'd have been very happy to pay ten million for something that would hand over three million every year.

Idle thoughts out loud...

A few decades ago, McDonalds aimed to get your order into your hands in thirty seconds. They've given up on that now and instead have a number of design and interaction dodges to hide how long it takes, or at least disguise it. For example, in many McDonalds now, there is no queue that you might easily see from outside or from the door (and thus decide to walk on). There might be a queue at each of the self-service order boards, but even those are placed (when possible) to disguise it from customers until its too late. McDonalds is no longer fast food, and it's expensive.

Whereas Greggs, from the point of ordering one of the key selling items, might well meet that thirty second target. Steak bake? It's right here in front of the employee facing you, reach down, bag it, hand it over. Sausage roll? Same. Anything in that counter, and anything that's sold out is obvious to the customer and will prompt a different order.

Queues, I know; a long queue in Greggs changes all that. I suspect (but cannot prove) though that the satisfaction of thirty seconds from actually making an order to having it in your hand still satisfies that quick-service button inside people's heads.

Where I'm going with this is that decades ago, McDonalds built their customer base on fast food. They either invented it, or at least were early mass-adopters. Now, if I want actual fast food, I don't go to McDonalds et al. I go to Greggs. I suspect (cannot prove) that the simple customer desire to be able to spend thirty seconds on the transaction never went away and Greggs meet that.

It's not only about customer satisfaction. Speed of service means able to serve more people means more money across the counter.

The Greggs in London Bridge station; I used to walk past that daily, in the early evening and again not far off ten p.m., and it was rare that the queue was not out the door. Every thirty seconds someone was putting a couple of quid on the counter. Four quid a minute, 240 an hour. Over 3000 pounds each day they're open coming across that counter. Honestly not impossible for that one, tiny little location to be dragging well over half a million pounds a year across that counter. Granted, that's a very special location, with a huge passing customer base, but if they spent five minutes serving each customer, they'd simply make far fewer sales.

As long as Greggs doesn't lose this formula, and remains one of the few places I can simply walk into and have something hot to eat in my hand thirty seconds later, I don't see them losing customers. Undervalued; I've got a bunch of GRG and I'm holding.

They did really like it. One of them wondered how a company so small survived doing broadcast control over the internet, when there were so many giants in the game.

Well, as far as I can tell, that's what the cancelled product (2.7 million write down in the finanicial statement) was going to be. Their "Prima" product. They cancelled that, fired a whole bunch of people, and now the existing sales of the existing products (which look to be controlling broadcast NOT over the internet) are suddenly so much larger than the costs (now that costs are so much less) that it's become a very cash positive company.

All the shareholders who held on and held on are rewarded (ironically, some seemed to be holding on in hopes that the new product would be really great, when what's actually rewarded them is the cancellation of the new product) suddenly, and as long as the market for their existing product continues, so will this company.