Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Chaps - this is the perennial shallowness of the LSE that I keep on waffling about. ;-) As soon as any decent buying dries up, even temporarily, its so easy to manipulate this down on miniscule volume. C'est la vie. Dow and S&P are down big today and it's good that the US market is taking a bit of a breather - it's been on a unrelenting upmove since November last year, and when it turns back up in the coming days/weeks, do will we.
The stock market is a reliable mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient - certainly when the sector has turned!!!
At least Lagarde has the proverbial balls and would have no qualms cut ahead of the US. Bailey is frigging useless and is a full-blown slave to the US, and to see him and his BOE cohort always running a rear-view mirror economic policy. The US economy is fundamentally different to the UK/Europe, and BOE would do well to focus on reviving the domestic economy and cut rates ASAP. However, like the mad hatter running THG, I'm not sure Bailey has the balls to do it. A UK rate cut would certainly help THG!!
"I suppose they way they look at it if it’s good enough for BT To have there head office in Johannesburg ,which I believe is South Africa. Then it’s good enough for capita.
Make sure you lot don’t leave any rope or razor blades about as you all have so much doom"
@Darkblue - Agree. To lighten the gloom and doom, I'm shorting BT. It's an easy way to make money as it slides a long way down from here along with its dividend when that is formally announced in May. I'm chomping at the bits when I think about the money I'll make from that short and from the money here from my ever building long position.
Cape town - the best place in South Africa. A great low cost base for Capita as they offshore away to lower cost English speaking countries outside the UK. Brexit has dealt a hammer blow to the UK economy, confounding the fantasies of the brexiteers and growth has all but vanished. All that CPI can do in this shiity economic environment is to cut costs and boost margins. If that means hiring more employees in SA and expanding your office footprint to a larger base, then why not? That's what will make us longs money. Along with shorting BT, may I add!!!
Indeed, thanks to 1msn for all the informative articles he finds and posts on here. Much appreciated.
If there's a small sign that SFOR's revenue decline is turning around, we'll see a good jump in the SP and Citi's target could just be achieved in 12 months' time. And the market is right now front-running that possibility. The large number of high-volume days is a testament to the accumulation that's happening in the stock.
Good luck holders.
Let's see if THG's stock price can do what SFOR's did on the day after the release of earnings - jump up handsomely after being knocked down the day before. If THG doesn't then we know who to thank for and it's that mad numpty at the top!!!
And let's not forget that we're listed on a shiite stock exchange where shorting based on revenue/EBITDA misses is far more easily rewarded than signs of a sector turnaround that's slowly but surely kicking in and this should've pushed the stock up a lot more already. If SFOR were to be listed on the NYSE I have zero doubt that our current market would be double what it is now on the LSE.
1msn - We're still not growing on an organic basis at an overall corporate level, whereas Publicis is - this is why they've had a 45% y-0-y increase in the stock price and we're down big from last year. You're referring to growth at the whopper and large client level, but SFOR's revenue isn't just all that, is it? I'm optimistic that it will change this year, even though MS has said revenue for 2025 will be flat to marginally down - he's low-balling expectations and is aiming to beat those numbers and push the SP, likely in H2. It's a good sign that Publicis is saying that tech clients' spending is coming back and that's THE most important metric for SFOR.
I'd think that Citi's sellside clients were privy to that research note prior to that being available on CNBC/general public and were frontrunning their purchases in the past few days. That is very typical of the sellside in the US, eh?
" one potential route out could be for CPI to merge with another business, perhaps one with expertise selling to private sector. I did think the comment someone made about the over reliance on Gov contracting i.e. calling for diversification would be a wise move, possibly a merger could be a good method to achieve that."
Just won't happen and isn't what an investment in CPI should be based on, IMO. This just isn't realistic when your market cap is circa £200m and when private sector outsourcing and the consulting services market in the UK/Europe is in the dumps!!! The upside to CPI's profitability/FCF forecasts could come from increased corporate spend in H2 24 and 2025 - that's realistic, but isn't a given unless the UK economy recovers from herein on. Another possibility as suggested by Peel Hunt is that CPI is an acquisition target at these rock-bottom price levels.
"Trisor... I guess i'd be concerned CPI were to again fall short at the next set of results and if concurrently BoE holds rates high & gilts remain elevated i.e. debt refinancing options are limited..."
Debt refinancing is the least of concerns for CPI, IMO. It's not like there are mountains of debt coming due in the next couple of years that this is a real concern. A read of the 2023 AR will inform us the private placement amortisations are the following.
2024 - NIL
2025 - £30m and $75m
2026 - £69m and $64m
2027 - £24 and $27m
2028 - $23m
The USD debt is forex risk hedged for a GBP carrying value of £132m. The interest rates on private placement notes above is fixed till maturity and unless they're needed to be refinanced at maturity, it doesn't matter what happens to interest rates in the interim.
There's too much fear built into the stock price without an appreciation for the large scale cost cuts being implemented - these will result in susbtantial FCF generation in 2025 and forwards. I suppose you can invest in a beast like BT and be happy with a good dividend yield or you hit the jackpot with a turnaround play like CPI. The focus that Adolfo is bringing to generate truly sustainable FCF via the volume of cuts being implemented is just not being reflected and I suppose fairly so given JL's history of missed forecasts. This is where the real opportunity remains for those who get in at these rock bottom valuations, IMO.
Happy to debate!!
"uk gilts up 11bps too..... seemingly bondholders suddenly now betting boe will struggle to make rate cuts to support uk economy because else it'll trigger £ to fall further against to $ as cutting would cause significant inflation to resume."
@savage - i'm not if this 11bps yield jump is at the short-end or the long-end of the gilts spectrum, but the us 2-yr treasury yields are up 21 bps and a deeper inversion is manifesting today in the treasuries market. i'm with you that i'd rather be the us than the uk. uk with its brexit shenanigans is a complete **** show versus the us which has the dollar as the world's reserve currency and there will always be plenty of 'creditors' who'll be willing to buy up their debt. the demise of the dollar and the us economy has been written by too many and too often, and every single time it confounds sceptics.
anyway, this isn't an economics discussion board, but a cpi stock discussion board and i won't labour on this too long, but it'll suffice to say that if the us economy prospers so will we, and vice versa. that's incontrovertible. we'll certainly run into deflation issues should the us economy slow down like we did in h2 2023 and that won't be good for cpi.
"We all have own opinions but I would be honestly stunned if the bid from Apollo was close to £2. As for the previous beneficial for all concerned £1.70 offer well the least said about that the better."
I've long said Apollo wouldn't have offered anything more than 150p and that's a 150% premium to the SP over a few weeks period prior to their approach. It isn't a surprise that Madders never made that number public.
Except that SFOR has a US dominant revenue at >80% and doesn't have a Madman who bites the hand that feeds it, running the show. I think THG will go up in the coming after today's selling is exhausted, but I can see this bouncing back up in the coming days. I've given up on calling for MadHat to go, he just won't go and any shareholder value that we can derive from THG will come need from a real strategy change from the Mad one -a US listing/splitting 7 listing divisions. He hasn't proven capable of any of these so far and we can only hope that he has a change of heart.
MildTiger will cut and run as soon as THG goes up to 65p (if not sooner) - it's as predictable as day and night.
MildTiger - assuming you've bought in, you'd cut and run after a 5% climb. Just see what to SFOR after you took your 8 - 10% profit there at 44p - it's now at 61p a few trading days later. I predict this is what will happen to THG too.
Unfortunately, MadMouldy is a gift that keeps giving to THG shorts. However, UK macro is improving and they'll probably cut rates first ahead of the Fed, and that's a good setup for an improving share price for holders. Patience helps, and so does ignoring shorts' noise on this board.
I bought some CPI shares this morning on my IBKR trading account and that trade doesn't even show up in the LSE trades list. Don't ask me why as everything that goes on here on the LSE is a mystery to me, well almost everything!!