Member Info for getafgrip

G2BH - You say that you will not be buying Deliveroo shares! You say that you do not hold any! You have no idea relating to the dynamics of a growth company! So why are you continually trolling a company that you claim to have no interest in whatsoever?

Instead of cutting and pasting the same clueless, unsubstantiated drivel repeatedly until you are given a new script! Why not inform the thread about what you would expect from a growth company, as opposed to say a frying pan manufacturer in Sheffield.

Deliveroo are pursuing growth in a relatively new market space. It is about market share, critical mass compared to the opposition, exploiting new market opportunities & cost of customer acquisition etc etc. At this relatively early stage they are not paying dividends, and you obviously have not got the vaguest clue why!

Against a difficult economic backdrop for delivery businesses, Deliveroo announced for Q4 2023, GTV for the Group of approaching £2 billion, including GTV up 7% for the UK & Ireland of £1.097 billion, and state they closed a successful 2023 with GTV in line with guidance and adjusted EBITDA slightly above the top end of the guidance range.

You will need to look up EBITDA, because you obviously do not have the slightest intimation of what it stands for, or its purpose! You say what are you missing! I would suggest it might be something to do with providing company for a very lonely brain cell!

Probably a bit more sense and direction when the impairments, and exactly where they have fallen, are exactified on the 1st February.

Sawan as a "new broom" CEO may well put the impairments at the top of the forecast range - $4.5 billion is a serious dampener for any party. Really could be quite positive in PR terms with an election only maybe 10-nonths away though.

Deltic has already held talks about farming down/monetisation of prospects beyond Pensacola, Selene & Syros so as you say this will form part of the solution, but there are a lot of permutations. I really think lending will be a significant part of the mix though. As you say it lets them hold ownership of more assets, and it will provide an alternative/additional source of funds & pressure a sharper deal on farming down/monetisation.

There still seems to be a lot of concern about the timing, and even whether a financial funding arrangement will take place for Deltic.It will take place, the only issues are timing & finalising the agreement.

There is no liquidity crisis in terms of funding a company with the prospects and backing that Deltic has. The release of the Competent Persons Report has been scheduled very carefully to support a pressure a very positive outcome to negotiations. Lenders are under pressure to become involved in the resurgence in North Sea activity, both commercially (many will have budgeted funds for this purpose), and politically in an election year.

As Deltic "transforms" so its funding mechanisms and opportunities will move up a gear. But, potential Lenders will also relish the shared limelight of the partnership with Shell. Also Shell can put considerable financial muscle behind ensuring that successful partnerships like this are given sufficient respect in the marketplace & this includes security of funding. If the partnership model with Deltic works they will most likely want to extend the partnership to future projects.

Funding of say £20m is not required instantly, or necessarily in one lump sum. It will be phased in as per the business plan and drilling schedule. There are a 100 variations of how a sophisticated loan facility might be implemented: it might be a rolling facility, it might be phased in terms of time or business milestones etc.

Realistically if a decision is made on funding really early in the game it is more likely to be less beneficial for the company and its investors, whereas the longer any deals take to agree the more likely it is to be of greater benefit to Deltic. Lenders will want to look at a deal that includes quite high interest rate forecasts, whereas many see them as having peaked. Also it is almost February & the point where Deltic develops its own revenue streams is rapidly approaching.

North Sea Transition Authority - Wells Insight Report 2023. Gives a great background perspective on Deltic's position in the market:

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A detailed report covering the performance of non-oil producing exploratory companies in the North Sea. A bit dated now but serves to show how successful Deltic is potentially becoming in 2024:

https://www.westwoodenergy.com/news/westwood-insight/north-sea-exploration-performance

Boyo - looking at KSA crude oil production for 2023, it came down from very roughly 10-10.5 million BPD in the first half of the year to an average of 9 million and a little below this consistently for the half beginning July 2023.

As you point out this effectively gives the KSA spare production capacity, which looks to be around a minimum of 10% consistently over the last 6-months +. Essentially its a safety buffer to mitigate any price shocks & introduces a swing-production element to their overall output, which they can change significantly depending on market conditions. Its all about "control" mechanisms.

Peter thanks for your post. I think Graham Swindells comes across very well - its a fantastic objective summary of the current situation and prospects for 2024. If he mentions the very obvious valuation gap often enough it will hopefully start to get filled sooner rather than later.

Graham Swindells described events as transformational & this looks really prophetic. Deltic is within an ace of not just being a low-cap "hit and hope" oil and gas exploration company, but becoming imminently a credible small oil & gas producer in an area of sharp political focus on energy security, and the common-sense aspect of exploiting our indigenous resources, before they go out of fashion. They have the big-brother partners, a business model proven to work, they are slim and fit, they have stepped up the hierarchy of prospective lenders, and Deltic now has a great offering to all business stakeholders and investors as a credible growth opportunity!

It seems obvious to quite a number of us, but imagine the free publicity surrounding Deltic's planned events later in the year, backed by the election hype from Sunak surrounding opening up the North Sea again.

Maybe it will switch off the doomsayers, who knows!

With hindsight I wish I had invested at this price with this level of positive news, but that's life. And you are unlikely to get it exactly right when a company has no proven revenue stream or established profit level - it is a speculative investment however you look at it.

In a worst case scenario if Pensacola fails totally there is Selene with its predicted 70% chance of success to fall back on, along with several other prospects. But, broadly speaking, as a very small team, Nunn has found the commercial oil discoveries to invest in, and Graham Swindell is the ideal corporate financier to make the necessary deals.

I cannot see any prospect of failure here, but the SP is still very subdued. Brent has been under pressure, investors are waiting for the first signs of interest rates coming down, but it may be there could be a bid in the offing. There must have been bid interest as the North Sea bandwagon starts to roll again. It would not be the first time that a company had been bid for, just to get hold of the successful team, but Deltic has stunning prospects and around £6m as a discount on purchase. It is very, very cheap at the current level!

Shell was probably committing to help open up the North Sea oil industry again as part of the agreement with the UK Government to domicile in the UK from the 1st January 2023.

Deltic has demonstrated that the partnership with Shell and One Dyas has worked brilliantly & scored lots of Brownie points with the UK Government. Why wouldn't they do it again and again!

From the RNS: "Deltic is continuing to engage with a number of different counterparties in relation to a range of potential transactions on both of these assets and looks forward to updating the market in due course."

I had decided not to post again until the results point in April, but this RNS is really significant. For me it doesn't hold any surprises whatsoever, other than being a welcome reinforcement of my positive views, but hopefully it will start to dissolve the unrelenting negativity of this thread. It confirms the really positive, but probably understated NPV outlook for Pensacola, touches on the prospects for Selene, & highlights the need for a "runway" of similarly hopefully equally successful projects.

Deltic Energy, in the esteemed company of Jim Ratcliffe's INEOS is in the forefront of opening up the North Sea exploration and production segment again. They are reflecting the political will in an election year, bolstering energy security and helping with the balance of payments, albeit in a small way!

The CEO has had a lot of criticism from this thread, but the RNS confirms that Deltic are looking at a range of options from various organisations. These will range from outright loans, revolving credit facilities, phases loans, issuing a bond, or shares or warrants etc. But, lenders will see Deltic as potentially one of the stars of the North Sea show - they will want to get involved with Deltic at this relatively early stage & Deltic holds the aces in terms of securing a great deal.

boyo - i can't really fault any of your assumptions in your last post. i must admit that i have been a bit mystified about the oil market over the last few weeks. this oilprice.com article seems to sum up a lot of my general views:

"why oil markets aren’t reacting to supply disruptions and geopolitical risk"

https://oilprice.com/energy/energy-general/why-oil-markets-arent-reacting-to-supply-disruptions-and-geopolitical-risk.html

the edge seems to have come off the "normal" market reaction to major events. several posters have mentioned the malaise and almost indifference that greets evidence of spreading with the middle-east conflict. everyone seems for instance to universally fear the consequences of escalation with iran. but, iran is flinging missiles at iraq, syria & now ****stan, backing hezbollah in lebanon, has sworn the eradication of the israeli state, etc whilst using the houthi's in yemen to disrupt world trade & particularly the oil trade.

it looks like 90% of container traffic has been diverted from the suez route, bulk carriers have been severely impacted along with tanker traffic. the lack of reaction seems to focus on container ships being much bigger so less reliant on the suez route and suez traffic having generally reduced over time, but i find this difficult to agree with. maybe the world reactions will change if a tanker is sunk off the coast of yemen, but the us and uk have already been drawn into a wider conflict with multiple yemeni bombing raids!

maybe there are concerns that unless the markets are anaesthetised they could panic escalation of the conflict to the level of western power boots on the ground. inflation has not fully been laid to rest, and shipping disruption will increase cpi, and we are talking about tax cuts - nothing to do with an upcoming election of course! crude oil production in north dakota falls by 650,000 to 700,000 bpd recently & although this heading for 1% of daily world usage - virtually no market reaction.

in the background the ksa is happy to confront us shale production with lower prices, and funding putin's war in ukraine will have its funding significantly destabilised. keeping the op low in an election year has multiple benefits including: inflation, interest rates and growth though.

at the moment raising the op appears to be as difficult as raising lazarus from the dead. cold weather! what cold weather!

If Poppy was pre-emptively clearing her share sales with institutional shareholders, they would then be a party to information not made available to all shareholders at the same time. And they would therefore be enabled to take commercial advantage of being a party to restricted circulation insider trading. It is patently ridiculous to assume that Poppy and other company sellers are this naive!

Hooters (Houthis) "surprise" announcement that they will be targetting American ships, not just ships heading for Israel:

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Houthis-Will-Target-US-Ships-in-the-Red-Sea.html

Suez Canal traffic:

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Suez-Canal-Crisis-A-New-Catalyst-for-Global-Inflation.html

Oilprice.com - Speculation on $110 a barrel But no conviction on this from the majority of analysts:

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Traders-Speculate-on-110-Oil-As-Middle-East-Tensions-Escalate.html

PG - Good advice - another version is that you have to remember that the shares don't know that you own them.

Also, you should not always ignore advice, just because it is not necessarily what you want to hear! Behind the company façade growth has slowed to snails pace when they are operating in the fragmented but rapidly growing cyber-security space. All the indications are there that there are issues with the marketing mix: that is the Product, Price, Promotion, Place, Physical Evidence, People, and Process.

BBC - I agree with you that it is a waste of your time reading comments here - what people are incapable of understanding, fails to inform them!

It might simply be that the Darktrace products are perceived as being too expensive!

The recent RNS states:

"Ending 1H 2024 with 9,232 customers, year-over-year growth in Darktrace's customer base was 12.9%, with the customer base having grown by 433 since 30th June 2023."

The facts is that Darktrace has a product that is widely accepted in the marketplace - 9,232 customers are highly unlikely to have made similar misjudgements and all be wrong! There have been no published instances of the Darktrace system failing any company, which would be disastrous if it were to happen! Darktrace is well established in the cyber security sector & has a decade of expertise across the World behind it!

But as Lending points out it is growing at Fiat 500 pace, in a market that has been growing exponentially! It may be that potential customers do not relish being the subject of hard-selling techniques (1200 Darktrace staff are engaged on direct marketing and selling activities). They may not like being locked in to multi-year contracts. Darktrace admits that its customer base has only been growing at a pedestrian 12.9% per annum, which is only around 1% a month & way behind its main competitors.

Growth rates were much higher, but have slipped dramatically since shortly after the IPO, and certainly since the higher interest rate environment started to seriously impact business spending worldwide. Or, maybe the competition are more effective in selling their products. Some of Darktrace's sales will be from say a customers newly set up subsidiary buying their products, some will certainly be from customer referrals. BUT, 1200, or more directly employed sales and marketing staff are pulling in only around an extra 90 new customers each month. Has anyone seen a cost of customer acquisition figure issued by Darktrace & importantly how it has changed over time!

What a difference a day makes - Brent at $80.67 a barrel - in tandem with cruise missile futures going up!

What really amazes me is that the OP was barely impacted by the escalating, increasingly provocative, Red Sea & Straits of Hormuz shipping threat, but a point was going to come when the US had to react. It is more than very debateable whether the Saudis, even with 300 combat aircraft could carry out a sophisticated & wide ranging attack like this, or they would have shown their capability in Yemen by now.