Member Info for cryptonomicon

Looked pretty good to me; basically the company is on a PE of around 15 and growing around 15% which is pretty good value. Plus, net cash of £54m. What's not to like (market shrugs indifferently).

Wasn't that impressed with the new CEO appointment, and suspect that is the reason for the recent SP weakness. Good company though and happy to hold. Decent dividend.

I would think the profits from outside Africa are just about enough to service the debt, but only just, so it's a bit of a zombie company for me. The dividend is unsustainable from a cash point of view.

There's certainly a horrible mismatch between having debt in hard currencies and trapped cash in a massively weakening currency. The profit from the Africa segment is essentially an accounting mirage i would say. Typically profits are flattered by high inflation because selling prices increase between buying the raw materials and selling the finished goods. In any case, the profits can't be repatriated so are essentially worthless in terms of servicing debt or paying dividends.

No idea what will happen in respect of the Nigerian economy or capital controls so it's all a bit too hard to value. Best scenario would be a takeover, but suspect the combination of family holding and uncertainty over Nigeria means it's unlikely.

I'm with you Sieveco. Reduced my holding by 80%, taken my loss and moved on. Too much ambiguous comms even now, goalposts continually shifting, nothing ever delivered.

We know that there are no licensing deals pending else there wouldn't have been any need for a raise. The genius that is AS embarked on a buy and build DX strategy without any experience in buy and build, and without any cash to do the buy bit! We were the highest bidder for those businesses so we will no doubt end up selling them at a loss.

My number one rule in investing is not to invest if i don't trust management and i broke that rule here because the science seemed compelling. I guess sometimes the market will remind you why that rule shouldn't be broken.

Kept a few shares because, who knows? Also just wonder if Affyxell might surprise us all at some point.

If the shares go up now - you're all welcome haha.

Agreed, the best scenario might be for AS to leave with the DX division.

I would hope the company will make the next couple of bond repayments in cash to avoid further dilution, whilst pursuing licence deals.

The kindest thing might be to put the whole company up for sale. I suspect it wouldn't fetch £200 or even £20 per share though, despite what the magic calculator says. But it would help more cancer sufferers more quickly under BP.

Anyway, we move from denial to anger and ultimately acceptance. Hopefully people haven't lost more than they can afford. ATB

You only have to follow the SP to know a placing is coming. They needed to get on with it last week ideally, but they never do things very quickly it would seem.

Looks like they got a great price for the Identicare business. Lots of value here. GLA

The market hates uncertainty, so yes, sure to be interesting today. If there is US involvement in a placing then conceivably there could be some details to finalise and an RNS later today.

Alternatively, we know AS likes a lower share price to make it easier to raise money and the company never seems to hit any deadline so why should this be any different?

I think the lack of RNS denying a placing is telling though.

On the plus side, AVCT has become one of the smaller constituents in my portfolio, so time to ignore it i think.

GLA

Agreed they should just get on with this; the SP has been telling us for a while that a placing is coming. They should be looking to raise a lot more than £30m of course, to pay off the convertible and to extend the cash runway.

Not sure why everyone gets so excited about a placing. I've always said dilution is likely, it's just a question of how much.

Onwards and upwards once this is out of the way.

And there are £8m of tax losses available so they won't be paying corporation tax any time soon.

It amazes me that anyone still takes any notice of anything AS says on timelines. Quite simply the triumph of hope over experience.

This will come good. How good for the shareholders depends on the level of dilution (if any).

It's nothing like the LFT situation, when you've got people like Dr Tap involved. AS controlled the LFT narrative in a way that simply isn't possible with AVA6k. That's pure FUD.

As the SP falls, Avacta becomes an ever smaller percentage of my portfolio and i can worry about it less, not more. One of the hard lessons about investing is not to overcommit to a single stock. When someone like Buffett talks about being greedy he's talking about well-established businesses with economic moats generating lots of free cash flow. Not biotechs.

Diamond hands everyone!

Looked pretty good and the outlook seemed positive. Cash has increased to £6.8m since December and market cap is only £12m, so you're effectively getting around £1m of PBT for £5.2m. Seems very cheap.

Stockopedia has dividend of 3.7p for full year, so yield of over 4%.

It's a shame the UK market doesn't give these companies a decent rating, but happy to hold here.

ATB

RD, totally agree. Maybe the chairman won't allow it? Seem to recall another meeting that Myles flagged up that never actually happened. MM is not shy about the fact that he trades around his core holding here, so AS is putting himself in a very awkward situation; it would be very easy to let something slip that he shouldn't.

Much prefer it if people just let management get on with it. Still looking forward to those inflection points we were promised.

Wouldn't think there's enough cash flow to interest PE. The company excludes corporation tax payments from their definition of free cash flow - wasn't aware those payments were discretionary!

I know the company has been in Nigeria a long time, but should/could they exit? That would leave a far more focused and appealing business for investors.

It's the volume weighted average price of all trades over the previous 5 or 10 days (whichever figure is lower) so not trivial to calculate. It does provide incentive to forward sell, and others to trade against, unfortunately.

I thought the fundraise was good at that time when markets were almost closed for biotechs. Disappointed that Heights don't appear to be hanging onto any shares.

From memory their parent company Susquehanna was an early investor in Bytedance ie. TikTok (in fact $5m became $15bn according to Wiki!), but i guess Heights is the fixed income branch?

Everything comes back to Avacta signing a licence deal(s) to remove this millstone and to close off any doubts about funding. That will be a good day here.

ATB

Was beginning to think these were getting a bit expensive, but interesting to see that DATA have sold a minority stake in one of their divisions to PE on a multiple of 22x's EBITDA. I've got both Relx and Wolters Kluwer in my SIPP. Stockopedia has them both on 19x's EBITDA and they are higher quality businesses IMO.

Anyway, Relx is one of those companies that always looks expensive but just compounds away without much drama. Great company.

Haha, yeah i love their almost complete disregard for The City. They let the numbers do the talking.

Clearly the financials have been agreed and most companies would have disclosed those in a flash. Sure, it's conditional on the creative guidelines, but i'd be amazed if there isn't at least a draft of those already in existence. It must be clear to Amazon that GAW won't roll over when it comes to protecting their IP, so i don't think either company would have signed the commercial contract if there wasn't a decent understanding of how this will work from a creative viewpoint.

Yank, to be fair if you look at the last annual report David Mitchell waived his non-exec fee. I don't think he is worried about losing a job which paid zilch last year. His wife is doing the buying in any case and in decent chunks so it shows a degree of confidence that there is value here.

We 've all seen examples of companies where the execs make token buys of a months' salary or so to prop up the price, but six figure buys are real money so more meaningful.

I'm still on the fence here owing to doubts about management, or more pertinently the culture that allows obviously dull games to be released. Are they all too nice to criticise anyone/anything?

DB's stake makes it unlikely that we will see either a takeover or a cash raise IMO, so it's all about the next game really. I expect they have enough cash runway to get that away, but it needs to be successful.

Haha np, notrex. Crypto is fine btw (good book though - Neal Stephenson)

Matml, my understanding of the takeover code is as per 2.2a:

"An announcement is required:

when a firm intention to make an offer is notified to the board of the offeree company by or on behalf of an offeror, irrespective of the attitude of the board to the offer;"

https://code.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk/tp/rules/rule-2/rule-2-2.html

The Pfizer thing was around a decade ago and i can't remember the details. Were they hoping for board recommendation and then went hostile? As has been said before, if a bid is conditional then it is not a firm offer and does not need announcing by the offeree.

Also, any offer may have been conditional on funding - $100bn is a chunk!

If BP decide to buy Avacta then funding will be from petty cash. I think the analogy with Pfizer is therefore a bit stretched tbh.

ATB

We know there hasn't been a formal offer from BP because the board would be obliged to tell us shareholders if there had been. The board do not own the company, we do. It's not for them to decide what is "enough".

They don't have to recommend an offer of course.

There could be conversations happening along the lines of - we'd like to offer £x per share would that be enough to get the board's recommendation? Those conversations do not have to be reported.

I think that is wishful thinking though. AS has made it very easy for BP to sit on their hands; time is not on Avacta's side, although i still believe that a single licence deal, however small, would unlock the floodgates. There must be some obscure therapy that could be licensed on the Precision platform for a single territory just to get the ball rolling, and without impacting the long term value of the IP. I keep coming back to the ARM/Texas Instruments deal - horrible commercials but the absolute making of the company.