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Sorry - not the number of shares, but the value for existing shareholders got clobbered by 84%. There were 50m shares back in 2019 - we had a small dilution last year, and then this year's pain. I think there's around 225m shares now.
Substantial - and recent. The number of shares have increased from May/June by 84% - https://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk/news/shares/revolution-bars-in-shock-discounted-cash-call
Yeah, I'm gutted for all those who paid up to 40p. Beyond the initial emotive piece - because this does appear to have come from nowhere - there is some growth possible still in that price. Stockopedia do have a potential up to 30p, but it's reliant on many things (not least full reopening) and I haven't gone through the numbers in any detail. I think my biggest issue is in the trust of a CEO and board who have been claiming results are awesome, whilst in the background hawking themselves at a 40% discount. There's no doubt it's better to lose some money than all (if things were that really bad), and there will be opportunities for them in a market that's been decimated, but would you trust them to be able to take full advantage of that?
There is absolutely nothing good in this for existing private investors, regardless of 'oversubscription' or 'opportunity' or any other positive spin on what's just happened. We were at pre-Covid values in terms of share price/market cap before this ludicrously high dilution. Moreover, this has been going on behind the scenes over the past few weeks whilst private investors have been paying 30p+ on the open market. How that is allowed to continue is absolutely criminal. Of course, the directors who've managed to grab their new shares and their institutional friends who've already made their money won't be held to account. I'm relatively lucky in that I had a reasonable average to not take too much of a hiding, but there's going to be many people who've just had 30%+ of THEIR MONEY removed from them without any recourse, any opportunity to be involved, and a minimal chance of getting it back. Been doing this long enough to take as much emotion out of it as possible, but in terms of what the company has just done to loyal investors, this is utterly disgusting.
I agree right now (though I'd argue that on a long enough timeline the market will out - hopefully we'll all have done very well by that point) - my point is simply to be careful for those who see points like 'this was valued at x' and think that ought to reflect on the price now. It was valued at that, but times/fundamentals/company were different and just because a share price was once at a particular value does not mean that we will see that price again when dilution, scale etc are all taken into account. I do think RBG is well placed to do well, should all go with reopening and the rest of the year. It does feel like the leadership have managed to get themselves in order, and it's promising, but just because it's gone up by 30% does not mean it will go up by 30%.
So we have to be careful not to conflate market cap and share price. The offer at 200p valued the entire business back in 2017 at just over 100m - the share price today sees a market cap of around 50m. We've some way to go - 2017, for example, had 69 sites and 130m in sales. Pre-pandemic, obviously, but it was a bit of a high water mark - market cap before the world went to hell was around 40m which implies we're already back to that position, if not above. Don't forget there was a rights issues that put the number of shares in the pool from 50m to 125m last year. I'm in here as much as anyone - and I do think we've a way to go just on sentiment - but DYOR, set your stop losses, and don't invest anymore than you can afford to lose.