Member Info for Desertsands

I know you shouldn’t get emotional about a share but oh Dear Lord if IAG was a human, I would’ve shot it by now.

Rant over……

Anyone/everyone at the end of their tether could always contact Kelso on their own Kelso Group Holdings number 07540333933 or their broker Zeus on 02038295000 and agitate for them to be more “ activist”…….. nothing to lose except a minute or two of time….

. Elementis doesn’t have to be an isolated occurrence

I rarely post on bb’s unless I feel I have something worthwhile to contribute. There is usually a measure of informed opinion and debate which is what they are supposed to be about. Recently chaps, you have sucked the enjoyment out of even reading the posts, let alone engaging.

Why not take your handbags outside and do your worst to each other…… your carry on says far more about you as people than you might realise and your points of view and opinions are getting lost in the point scoring oneupmanship battle you are raging. You are better than this….

I for one think it would be nice to have the debate back because you both had valuable input that you contributed.

Morning everyone -

This was published yesterday and I thought it might be of interest to this bb, not as an investment but as a discussion topic as there seem to be many parallels regarding sentiment with THG. Interesting that the BOB here responded to this letter but unless I'm mistaken, the BOD of THG has not responded to Kelso's RNS. I can't copy the link so it's a copy & paste jobbie.

"The top shareholder of FTSE 250 chemicals maker Elementis has called for the business to be sold in a scathing letter calling out the firm’s management for “value destructive capital allocation” and “inability to improve operating performance”.

Franklin Mutual Series, an autonomous specialist investment manager within Franklin Templeton, holds 9.8% of shares in Elementis, which makes key ingredients in antiperspirants and paint, having first invested in 2020.

But Franklin Mutual said a number of poor decisions had prevented the shares from reaching their potential.

The firm noted that in 2017 and 2018, the business acquired fellow chemicals businesses SummitReheis and Mondo Minerals for a combined $860 million, yet its current market cap is only $650 million, after a 50% share price decline.

“This is a shocking amount of shareholder value destruction,” the letter said.

Franklin Mutual said the best option now was for the business to be sold to a larger chemicals firm.

“We believe that the company is not of a sufficient size to accomplish its targets,” it said. “We contend it would benefit from being part of a larger organization to achieve economies of scale.”

In its response, the board of Elementis said it “does not consider an immediate sale of the Company to be in the best interests of its shareholders”.

The letter sparked a surge in Elementis’ share price, which was up by as much as 11% to 127p, before dipping back to 122.4p.

But Franklin Mutual said the response was “inadaquete”, and suggested that other shareholders may feel the same.

“The board’s response to our letter is totally inadequate,” Steve Raineri, SVP and lead portfolio manager at Franklin Mutual Series, said. We are however encouraged by the initial outreach we have received this morning from other shareholders"

Apologies if of no interest but thought it worth posting here ...

Legalwolf - yes….. you are right when you state director holdings are taken broadly as an important investment metric, cheerfully called ‘skin in the game’ and you are also right to make the point that the director holdings here are, shall we say, negligible.

Hi Manifesto

Think I recognise you from THG bb?

Good to see there is life after death with this share…. I know some will be really deeply underwater here but opportunities do present when least expected. I’m a recent buy in so haven’t had to endure the grief with this share but I have with other shares and it’s just pants.

I think talk of a buy out or take over at this very early stage after the horror of earlier events is premature. I think any company thinking along those lines would need to see a period of settlement, adjustment, stability and growth before contemplating exposing their own brand to possible ‘tainted by association’ slurs. You only have to look at how Darktrace has had to battle the Mike Lynch/Autonomy/questionable accounting debacle and how that has affected their share price. They seem to be coming out of the other side of the tunnel of horrors, so to speak, and hopefully it’s the same for this share and momentum and sentiment is here to build on.

Being blue isn’t always a bad thing!

AIMO

KELSO put in writing what other investors -institutional and private- are feeling. Their post interim RNS is well worded to convey frustration and perhaps a warning shot across THG’s bow. Things clearly cannot stand as they are for any length of time. Disruption can be a good thing.

Let’s see how activist Kelso are…..

Oh look! It can go up as well as down - good to know!

Who said being blue was a bad thing …….

Maybe for their subscriber articles but not across the board. … a lot of the points raised in the body of the article mirror a recent précis that Bloomberg put out.

If the delay to the petrol/diesel car ban goes ahead here ( and maybe other countries will follow - after all, no one wants to be the first to put their head above the parapet but are happy to follow), then we’ll see greater forward momentum. I get that we have to plan for the future but we still need to live in the here and now.

Onwards & upwards….. hopefully….

Inflation is coming down faster than they thought this month at least, and maybe interest rates have peaked on the inflation figure, wages are now outstripping, inflation and people love to jet off as and when they can. Shares are pretty much up across-the-board…..

Whatever the reason, especially with this particular share, I’ll gladly take the upswing. This one has really been a slog……

Can’t seem to copy the link but for anyone that is interested, Simply Wall Street has today published an article stating the intrinsic value for JMAT is 61% over the current share price.

Now if only we could unlock that value in the not too distant…….

Nice way to end the week - 5,026,128 UT buy for £87m

Hereshopin

No, not at all….

At listing, Ingenuity was presented as a fully developed, ready to go, all bells & whistles - the jewel in the crown, if you like. Phrases such as ‘we have developed a proprietary system…..’ ‘ Ingenuity can….’ , ‘ingenuity has the capability….’ Etc rather than “ we are developing/ ingenuity will be able to/ingenuity will have the capability etc. non THG enterprises that have signed up have only fairly recently done so and are not all in….. L’Oréal, for example - only 2 of their brands are trialing. Matalan is there yes and I’m not saying they have no sign ups but even THG admit they are actively trying to engage more and indeed Vivek and MM both state that they are “ now ready to show the world what ingenuity can do” , that they are “now enjoying the reaction” of customers ( and they are now starting to court high value) to whom they are now showcasing “ the potential” of ingenuity for their companies. The quotes are taken directly from THG . It is only fairly recently that they have been able to engage in such demonstrations …… all companies are looking to mitigate costs and gain efficiencies and hereshopin ( sorry, I couldn’t resist) that’s a whale or two may step up and that ingenuity is ready for the scale up. By THG’s own admission, it wasn’t ready before.

Ingenuity has come a long way, but it certainly wasn’t the fully developed system that was portrayed at listing. It’s only recently that the infrastructure for some of their bases has been fully signed off!

Let’s see what the next CAPEX figures are for Ingenuity…..

Hi hereshopin

No, not quite. Your statement that I assess THG as pre-IPO, because it still needs capital is not the central tenet of my point. It goes without saying that all companies need capital. My point was that THG’s ingenuity has always been presented as a complete product, and the impression was always given that the reason nobody could assign a value to it was because they didn’t understand it. It more seems to me that the reason nobody can assign a value to it is because it is still a relatively new concept and even buy their own admission on the investor call yesterday, it is still being developed and rolled out. The physical external infrastructure may be there to scale, but it is only now just starting to come to life.

I think we all have a dream within us, and if we all had an unlimited pot of money, we could all bring that dream to fruition. Whether or not at the end of the day, the value of achieving that dream would outweigh the costs that went in to achieving it is a completely separate question.

Hi…. only my second ever post on LSE - hopefully I’ll be welcomed and not attacked by the toxic trope. I think that’s something that has put me off from posting in the past.

It’s been interesting reading the variety of posts on this particular forum and perhaps getting to know the posters a little by what they write, especially seeing how some have evolved over the last couple of years.

I only invest in 12 different shares of which THG is one. I am a long-term holder and with the current dip I’m underwater as I’m guessing quite a number of others also are. I listened to the investor call that was held yesterday and I’ve actually changed my thinking somewhat on this share. I was always in it for the long haul and have not actively been hoping or praying for an MBO or a takeout/delist. That has not changed. To me what became clear yesterday on the investor call, was that THG is not, as has been presented numerous times in the past, a completely developed company. It is still very much a work in progress and is still in its infancy. D2C yes but not to scale. Yet. And yes, I heard that last year too.

Yes, nutrition and beauty have well established brands, but they are all still being linked with ingenuity which is very much a concept coming to reality, despite separation of the divisions. For me personally, THG is very much as a pre-IPO because of where it is in its development. A lot of the forum members bring up CAPEX and quite rightly, so…. THG, launched as a complete package when in reality., it still has a fair way to go, particularly because of ingenuity. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to assign a value to ingenuity, and indeed to THG as a whole. I think for the THG concept in its entirety to be developed, it needed the capital that the listing afforded it. I do agree that in particular the CEO would struggle to let it go because he has such a clear vision of how he wants it to be, and even perhaps how it could and should be. Unfortunately, I do not believe that even he had deep enough pockets to bring that to fruition without the investment that has come from listing. There are investors on board that have very deep pockets indeed, and yet still it remains a work in progress at a rudimentary level.

The question I now ask myself is am I happy to continue to hold, knowing that it is going to be quite some time before THG, as a whole is understood and can be assigned a realistic and tangible evaluation. There is still so much work to be done and it will not happen overnight. A lot of you also mention jam tomorrow….. for me personally, I can’t help, but feel a little annoyed, for want of a better expression, that the word ‘adjusted’ is used with such alarming frequency ( I counted 18 examples) that THG’s own projections cannot be relied upon even within a reasonable margin of error.

Delivering shareholder value is the primary responsibility of the company. And that company does not

Anyone else click the broker upgrade yesterday from Deutsche…. Now rating JMAT as a TOP PICK