Questor tip 220 Oct 2021 09:31
Unfortunately, while such an anomaly may offer an opportunity to anyone who buys now, at about 63p, it also reflects the serious paper loss suffered by readers who invested when we first tipped the shares in March 2019, when they stood at 97.5p.
Those savers can at least take heart from the stock’s highly undemanding valuation and a trading update it published last week, when it said it had generated revenues of £11.7m in the three months to the end of September. This was a third higher than in the previous quarter, 62pc more than in the third quarter of last year and, perhaps a more relevant comparison in view of Covid disruption, a 47pc improvement on the same quarter of 2019.
The Aim-quoted company’s broker, Canaccord Genuity, has forecast sales of £42m for the full year but “current trends indicate that this is way too low – we expect £50m”, Bernstein says.
With this kind of sales growth, and that important expectation that it will translate into earnings growth, why are the shares so cheaply valued? It looks like another case of investors being once bitten, twice shy: they were burnt by a poorly communicated profits warning just before the pandemic began – a profits warning that, in Bernstein’s view, reflected an earlier culture of aggressive accounting, not helped by the fact that at that time the finance chief did not sit on the board. That has now changed and the new chief financial officer, Richard Cooper, “is doing an excellent job”, he says.
The company was of course hardly helped by lockdown, when travel bans led to a slump in demand for foreign currency, and investors may worry that winter will bring a repeat.