Member Info for HarChris

Airlineboy, simply because shareholders would 100% decline a buyout at £68m, they would decline it with certainty even at £100m.

What can happen in a situation like this is a buyer attempts to take advantage of the situation and buy the company out at say a price equivalent to net assets - in this case about £2.05 a share. No bids probably means there isn't an entity with that sort of buying power that is interested in paying over 100% premium.

Tough to get one's head around, I mean the share price spiked to £2.23 on the 17th February 2020 the day novacyt announced they were launching a CE novel coronavirus test. This was a whole month before the WHO declared covid a pandemic and well before big orders starting coming in - in fact there was absolutely no sign that testing was going to become a thing at that stage and yet still, in mid February, novacyt with £1.5m cash in hand and £7m of debt saw its share price rise to £2.23 intra day.

What's happened since and to now be at £0.94 is just so unusual.

Genuine question, has anyone ever come across a company that can comfortably buy back ALL their shares?!

I know in reality that couldn't happen and even announcing a buyback would send the share price north but has anyone got any examples of another business with more than enough cash on hand to buy out their own company in one fell swoop?

Maybe so but with how difficult things are about to become for small business we may well be picking up companies that were worth £30m earlier this year and £20m today for £10m a little later in the year.

Your holidays set you back £21k?!

Sourcebio* sourcebio* sourcebio* apologies.

Interesting to see how Sourcebio's share price has held up as they are the closest company to us and an ideal one to compare with.

Cash wise Biosynex is at £15.2m (a fall of £2m over the twelve months) and revenue for H1 fell from £37.3m to £20.5m. Novacyt is at £99.6m cash ( a fall of £2m also) but revenue has fallen from £52.2m last year in H1 to just £16.5m.

Novacyt therefore clearly have the stronger balance sheet by some margin with over six times the cash biosynex has but their share price has held far firmer - this must be down to a combination of their significant institutional holdings as well as much less severe drop off in revenue this year.

Market caps are £68m and £89m respectively (yes that's right, sourcebio the latter)

Oh in answer to your question yes. However any whiff of an interested party would see the share price soar from here so the actual chance that novacyt is taken over for say £120m is pretty low.

When the first biosynex holding rns landed in mid February for example the share price jumped quickly to about 225p. Considerable further buying and i'm sure we'd have seen £3+ very quickly.

£102m at last count but that was back end of 2021, we don't have an updated cash position although this is a pretty low cost business with high margins so it won't be far off that at worst.

That cash position also includes significant write-downs following the DHSC dispute which puts them in a position where any result from that dispute is likely to increase the cash position rather than exhaust it.

At last count net assets were £141m, now about 2.1 times the current market cap - seems ludicrous but management has looked shaky this year and perhaps lacking in the ability to push the company on which explains the total loss of interest and sentiment here

The problem is, whether true or not, you seem deeply disingenuous. You act like you know what's coming, you call for £1 and keep saying it's going under that and then when it does you then start acting like you're so confused to how it could have got to this and therefore are just asking honest searching questions. None of it adds up.

I understand how it's got to this, it shouldn't have and I didn't expect it to earlier this year but I'm not particularly suprised today to see it at new all time lows. I tend to sell down on bad news, this isn't it, this is just further weakness due to broader markets + nothing company specific to reverse the trend.

It's hard to deny though that you become enthused and take over the BB on days like today, on awful new lows.

That's all well and good but we're only 20 months away from the next halving and the goal has always been to accumulate as much BTC as possible prior to the halving as well as having made significant progress on the alternative revenue streams.

Progress made too slowly isn't actually progress in an industry like this.

Nothing's a certainty but I still feel more comfortable investing in a diagnostics company with a huge amount of cash runway than say one like yourgene which is valued similar to us, is still loss making and has a fraction of the funds novacyt has.

Is ten months not enough time to make a change? I certainly thought so but perhaps some of us underestimated the difficulty in the post-covid transition. 2021 was only loss making because of all the write-downs relating to the DHSC, we'd have been looking at about £30m profit otherwise.

It's been as bad as on could imagine up until now but that doesn't mean it continues forever, let's wait and see what the latest cash figure is before you conclude that novacyt are haemorrhaging it away.

The share price is currently about 7-8 times what it was in early 2020. Pre-covid they were going no where, £1.5m cash and around £7m debt and yet by June 2020 all the debt had been cleared (including some CLNs to Vatel) and novacyt then went on to make £130m that year.

It's impossible to even attempt to compare the balance sheet from a few years ago - novacyt as a low revenue, non profitable diagnostic business with not insubstantial debt was absolutely up against it to remain solvent... today they've become a recognisable name in diagnostics working alongside the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and the biggest NGOs in the world.

7-8 times share price growth is shocking all things considered - it's simply because management have failed to show how transformative this enormous windfall/cash injection is, for now they are performing like the small cap barely solvent minnow they once were.

That's surely got to change at some point but boy is it taking longer than it ever should have.

Is this Sharehunter with a new account?

From what I remember losing the dispute has always been discussed on here, with a number of posters roughly working out the maximum repayments on either side. I think it was in the range of about -£40m to +£70m but would be good to have someone give more precise workings out on that front or dig up some of the discussions we were having early this year.

For goodness sake this site keeps logging me out and I keep signing in with the wrong email and nearly posting on my old original account - this time I made the mistake. No deception or anything, just a name reversal!

(If there's any mods reading can you delete the other account please)

I imagine all mining expansion (not just Mokopane but Vanchem & Vametco too) will be on hold until they've seen consistent and stable production of ~5200mtV with a new lower cost base - once this is achieved there will be far clearer visibility of future profits and a higher share price giving us access to greater funds if necessarily (hopefully able to build out to 8000mtV primarily through cash generation but makes sense to take on some debt/equity along the way )

Yeah I think we're all in agreement, the information we are receiving from the likes of Mandy doesn't correspond with the actual figures we are then being presented with, something somewhere isn't right. Fortunately you would think the last set of results was the nadir, it should be rather easy to see an improvement from such a low floor but we're past the point now of chalking things up to DA's grace period and we really need to start seeing wholesale changes.

'How are we to see any improvement in sp if the status quo exists in future, regardless of how future sales improve?'

Because investors largely look at key financial metrics when making investment decisions, we aren't meant to be privy to each and every sales contract but we do get to see every few months the evidence of increased business activity in the trading updates (twice yearly but we get snapshots along the way too).

To be valued as low as we are takes some doing, to almost certainly be valued well below net cash in a growing sector like diagnostics requires real f*** ups by key management and that's exactly what we've seen so far. Quarter on quarter revenue downgrades evaporate trust and makes claims such as exceeding £100m revenue within 5 years totally meaningless.

It of course doesn't help that we are left largely in the dark as to why sales have fallen off a cliff to such a degree but I still think what matters is evidence of a turnaround in the financials.