Member Info for getafgrip

£25 million already stated with apologies!

Apologies £25 million!

Isn't 1% of Dark's £2.5 billion capitalisation £250,000,000 shares in shorts. Doesn't seem tiny to me!

Charles - $ or £'s it's still very high on the Hyperbole-ometer. If the average customer spends $67,000 a year and there are 6500 of them and climbing. That bangs the revenue up to $435,500,000!

Gordon Hurst Chairman of Darktrace statement at the AGM on November the 24th 2021 was:

"For FY2021 our YOY revenue grew 41% alongside a revenue CAGR of 52% from 2018 to 2021. This exceptional financial profile is further bolstered by $343m of ARR and a revenue number for the FY2021 of $281m."

One or all of these figures are not right or probably exaggerated! Even if 40% is added to the FY2021 actual revenue of $281m, it only comes to $393.4m. The Dark revenue forecast for 2022 looks overstated on these figures by approaching 10%.

Re-posted

"ML - he still may make suggestions behind the scenes, he no longer has any formal influence o over the company other than as a ordinary shareholder with 15.5% (combined) of the voting rights. My perception is that the MT and the BoD are now well placed to carry on the batten without him."

I would hazard a guess that the majority of investors see Dark as being led by science technology. If the Board are happy to carry on the batten without ML they will lose half of their Science and Technology Committee, as there are only two members. The other member with ML is Professor Nick Jennings CB FREng.

If Science and Technology are fundamental to Dark, it is highly likely that meetings of the Science and Technology Committee, do not just involve a meeting between the two Committee members, at Dark's Head Office, and a short note of the meeting's minutes being passed to the CTO. It is much more likely that Poppy and a few other key executives make themselves available for the meeting. Something of a Board meeting without being classified as such.

With his wife ML together as an entity they are significant shareholders .At Cambridge University, Dr Lynch studied Information Sciences and received a Ph.D. and held a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition. "he no longer has any formal influence over the company" - come on Lending surely you can provide better analytical assessment than that!

ML as certainky on Boris's Science and Technology Committee, well that links him with Government at the highest level as well, and forms part of the Government link with Darktrace. Plus several key players at Dark who are" ex-security services":

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-members-of-the-council-for-science-and-technology-confirmed

Will ML have any links or input to Boris's new National Cyber Security Centre. You bet he will:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-members-of-the-council-for-science-and-technology-confirmed

Will this be of interest to Dark? Of course it will.

The Court cases over the Autonomy "Fraud" may easily be an attempt to get ML over to the States & then come up with a plea bargain for him to work for US security services in return for not going to jail. Will the UK let him go? I very much doubt it - but the British do not have an impressive record with gifted genius mathematicians. Remember that Alan Turing was chemically castrated by a grateful nation as his reward for arguably bringing the Second World War to a speedier conclusion!

The ML court case is by no means straightforward. It is not just about fraudulent rights and wrongs!

W - i get most of my tips from the Invisible Man. He never disagrees & by his silence indicates that I am always right. And there is no charge for his services. You can get in touch with him on: nowyouseemenowyoudont@neverneverland.com

The big investment banks and funds are just hovering in the wings waiting to pounce this morning. Their chief analysts are Lord Lucan, Marvo the Magician & the Invisible Man. The first mover advantage is more likely to go to Harry Houdini though, as he is predicting that the shares will range between £2.50p and £10.00p this morning. By this afternoon Dark should hit £20.00p and we will all be millionaires - the great escape will be a reality..

I am quite shocked that you have two people sufficiently clueless to recommend your calculations of EV.

I had tried not to be offensive with this, but your calculations of EV & Shell's future share value, or more accurately estimate of future takeover value, are ludicrously inaccurate. They are based on a somewhat tenuous grip of the figures and facts, then using utterly useless DIY formulae. Baffling people with science albeit inaccurate.

Even your estimate of Shell's current capitalisation is wrong by $5 billion dollars, based on today's figures from this LSE Board. There is nothing clever about misinforming people, who might quite easily go on to invest in Shell labouring under a series of misapprehensions.

I hope the two recommenders take this on board rather than recommending posts in future that are well outside their orbit of knowledge or understanding.

Dark does not readily lend itself to a standard accounts book definition of how Gross Margin is calculated:

Konstantin Valchev in Openview VC Insights stated:

"When we at OpenView consider a company for venture funding, the Gross Margin is an important indicator of how profitable and scalable the business is. When a company that looks to raise venture capital funding is a SaaS company, the criterion for the Gross Margin does change.

Typically, a good SaaS business model should have a gross margin of about 80-90%. This means that the Cost of Goods Sold should be around 10-20% of the total Revenue.

The product that the SaaS companies provide is a software enabled service, mainly delivered over the Internet. Therefore, the items that comprise the COGS for this business model are different from those found in the COGS of traditional Software businesses.

This is a list of the general costs that comprise the COGS for a SaaS business and are not part of the Operating Expenses:

Application hosting and monitoring costs

Customer support and account management costs

Data communication expense

Software license fees for products embedded in the application

Website development and support costs

Professional services and training personnel costs

Costs of subscriptions"

What I am trying to get across is that Dark might claim 90% Gross Margin, but you need to have some idea what criteria they use to calculate this!

My issue is you using Net Debt in your calculation.

Net Debt is defined as all short and long-term liabilities minus the current assets. As you know it reflects a company's ability to meet all of its obligations simultaneously using only those assets that are easily liquidated.

Current Assets do not just include Cash, they also include stock (that can easily be sold) & debtors. I think this skews your calculation, so I cannot agree with your EV forecasts.

The average customer spends £67,000 a year and there are 6500 of them and climbing. Well that bangs the revenue up to £435,500,000! Are you a creative accountant by any chance?

HI - Isn't EV - Market Capitalization + outstanding debt and then subtract available cash. The cash makes quite a difference when deducted. Still an exciting prospect though.

Everything else about Shell plc is going up "at pace" - so why not the share price as well!

Mr Anonymous contributor - A 90% Gross Margin is excellent, particularly if you parrot it often enough, but it is a figure sourced from a predominantly Marketing/Sales orientated company. It is unlikely to be a low margin business from the company "lines to take" perspective. You should be questioning the accuracy of this claim!

Out of a workforce of 1500, 60% are sales and marketing staff (source Guardian). They are part of the Cost of Sales i.e. they are part of the 10 % of sales, allocated in the Gross Margin calculation. Growth in customer numbers is impressive, but how does Dark define a customer. Churn rate is reducing, but how is it counted, is the value of customers acquired rising or falling - if the number of customers is rising significantly, is the churn-rate being massaged to show regular improvement.

I recall someone on the Board wanting a list of Dark customers. Come on think about it - please! Dark are simply not going to tell you or anyone else the identity of the big airline contract recently, or any other customer. The reasons why are so blindingly obvious. But, it is a 1000-flight a day airline, so that narrows it down to what 4 x US airlines, maybe 12 x World airlines in total. You cannot break this opaque facade, it is critical to Dark's product dynamics, reputation and sales. But, it also means that Dark can play games with the figures it releases - obviously this has resonance with other ML companies & don't they have the same DNA?

Let's say Dark has 1000 Sales and Marketing staff. It has 6500 customers, so pro rata they have pulled in 6 1/2 customers each at this point - is this a high or low number. Let's say they are paid £20-£30,000 each per year, with their apportionment of some office costs. So that the Cost of Customer Aquisition, could be £5,000 + a plethora of other costs - advertising, internet, travel expenses etc.

We should be asking - What is the Cost of Customer Acquisition, what is it today compared with say a year ago? How many are £100k + accounts, how many are repeat customers, which competitor are they going to, are they not convinced of the need for cyber-security, are they "buying" new customers with low price deals? Are they seen in the market as a slick Marketing and Sales led company, or a serious cyber-security player, or both!

You also state that big fund managers have been looking at Dark for a year, but have done nothing. This is an inordinately long thought to action gestation period!

Please don't tell everyone yet again what Jeffries target is! Everyone got that the 5000th time you said it!

How green is nuclear energy - are there shades of green:

https://physicsworld.com/a/how-green-is-nuclear-energy/

https://www.worldenergy.org/assets/downloads/The_shades_of_green_for_publishing_FINAL_2019.pdf

Tell me something I don't know MRM. My father-in-law was a nuclear safety engineer his whole life!

Harbour Energy is the UK's biggest oil company!!! What!!!!

Yet another chance to catch the falling knife, because unfortunately someone has thrown it up in the air again today! I agree these are desperate times as Shell has "fallen" to its high for the last year!

Maybe they could classify nuclear power as green for the first year of operation!

Then perhaps a very light green changing fractionally each year, over the next 10,000 years:

The radioactivity of nuclear waste naturally decays, and has a finite radiotoxic lifetime. Within a period of 1,000-10,000 years, the radioactivity of High Level Waste (HLW) decays to that of the originally mined ore.

Apologies not "accounting" more like "amounting to the equivalent of" would do the trick!