Member Info for HeadInTheSand

Parsley, it would help if you had even the most basic grasp of English. However, in an effort to enlighten the most terminally ignorant, let me lay it out for you again in playschool language.

As per the recent RNS, AVN's 10 largest institutional shareholders own 85% of the company.

Of those, the 5 largest own 75% of the company.

And of those, the 3 very largest own 62% of the company.

Not too difficult to get your little mind around, is it?

And thanks, but I fully understand latency. It's also not a difficult thing, but does involve understanding the fact that the speed of light cannot be surpassed. However, that type of concept is clearly way WAY above your pay grade, so I wouldn't worry if I were you.

Do have a nice day now.

Jaffas, you're wrong.

Sadly this type of disgrace is all too common on AIM. The old boys' networks all too often look after their chums - and in so doing, vigorously pick the pockets of long-suffering PIs. It happens all over AIM and all of the time.

And it's not just too many AIM-listed BoDs that get up to this sort of shenanigans. The Nomads - who let's not forget are meant to be there as watchmen to make sure that PIs don't get fibbed to in RNSes - all too often seem to do no checking whatsoever as to the factual accuracy of any information so released and just sign anything off regardless.

Probably because they've been bunged a case of vintage claret or something...

Adrian, you could try voting against the delist resolution, sure.

Trouble is, as AVN has made clear in the recent RNS, their 10 largest shareholders hold 85%, their 5 largest shareholders hold 75% and their 3 largest shareholders hold 62%.

AVN has already got the 3 biggest fully onboard with their delisting plan. It's a fair bet that they'll get most if not all of the other large shareholders onboard and voting in favour of delisting too. Which makes the vote at the forthcoming General Meeting a foregone conclusion... they'll delist.

By all means hold onto your shares and vote against delist if you like - but if it goes through on 5th Sept (and it's a racing certainty that it will, as per above) that then only leaves you 12 days to offload your held AVN shares... that is, presuming you don't want to end up holding illiquid and almost entirely untradeable shares in a private company.

Entirely up to you though...

Dan, no I can't speak for anyone else bar myself (obviously), but actually I don't think it particularly matters *why* people comment as they do... far more important to me at least is *what* they say AND how well they justify it.

Here's some info for you. I don't hold shares in AVN - but I am involved in the alternative broadband industry (NB not within an operator) and as such know AVN, its history, its routes to markets and its competitors (within satellite and other wire-free broadband technologies) pretty well. That's why I've tended to comment here now and then.

So taking MTB's expressed opinions for example. Utterly regardless of the fact that he and I have been of like mind (that's irrelevant), he's always justified the reasoning behind his thinking. To me that then makes his opinions far more worthwhile than say the likes of GCCRa who has only ever effectively said "Incredible bargain! Set to rocket! Buy now before too late! And anyone disagreeing with me is a poopyhead!"

Will, I am sure you were right. Managing to leave the Hotel California was absolutely the right thing to do, even if it cost a few bob. Blame Georgie for not doing what he should have :)

I'm of like mind. A few days back, I ripped up my 1.00p buy orders, because they're IMO unsafe, given SP trends, which I believe are now set for the mid-term... until well into 2020 in my view, when Balcombe and Saltfleetby eventually start being truth-tested.. There's far easier and much less risky trading money to be made elsewhere.

Dan, don't be ridiculous. Nobody here to my knowledge has "wished ill" on AVN... and even if they had, what possible difference would it have made?

All some have done - including me now and then - is look dispassionately at AVN, focussed on facts and fundamentals and as a result have presented a less than positive opinion on the company's prospects. Looking at yesterday's news, I would say that those of us with such opinions have been conclusively proven to be 100% correct, no?

And that's not stated as a self-congratulatory thing in any way. I'd of course have liked for AVN to be a success - it's a British company after all - and I have a deal of respect for Kyle Whitehill, who clearly has been trying to take the company in a far more sensible direction.

Unfortunately - as is now clear to all - the damage caused by the shocking mismanagement and profligate spending under the Williams regime was simply not going to be repairable in time. The historic hole beneath the waterline and the attendant debt millstone were both so massive as to make Kyle Whitehill's task an extreme long shot, no matter how good a go he gave it.

IMO, most right-thinking PIs' anger should be reserved for swivel-eyed fanatics like GCCRa who in the face of all the factual evidence have spent the last two plus years assuring everyone and anyone that AVN shares are an imminent multibagger and that riches are quite literally just around the corner, while simultaneously ****ging off anyone daring to express a counter-opinion. And let's face it, it's exactly that sort of mindless ramping that actually requires counter-opinions to be expressed.

Hopefully nobody ever listened to his endless "Strong Buy" recommendations and got suckered in by such endless ramping. I guess we'll never know whether he and his like were just delusionary or company shills - not that it really matters now.

Yes. Who the hell would want to take on the $500m debt?

The usual suspects continue to circle, keeping their beady eyes on AVN, hoping to get the assets cheap in the event of a fire sale caused by the company going pop. I'm hearing that the main thing the vultures are interested in is absolutely not the AVN orbiting hardware - that's hardly state of the art and has already been superseded in terms of its tech by satellites owned by AVN's competitors that are already in operation.

Nope, it's AVN's orbital position rights and frequency allocations/footprints that are much more of interest. But not anywhere near of enough interest to inspire any competitor to take that debt mountain on.

Well Rom, being brutal about this...

Getting off AIM and becoming private saves AVN about $500k in costs, according to today's RNS anyways. Although small beer in terms of other costs and debt interest, as the TV ad says, every little helps.

It also frees up management time not having to play kissy-ass with the City.

It allows AVN the freedom not to wash its dirty linen in public, because there'll be no need to disclose diddly squat.

It also allows AVN the related further freedom to operate in unregulated ways.

Although I think that this impending delist a) does the company's credibility no favours at all and b) is a game-ending smack in the teeth for all but the ballsiest of PIs, the fact remains that AVN clearly doesn't have a prayer of raising any meaningful funds - and we all know it needs plenty to keep the lights on - via a share issue.

So although this delisting seems to very definitely screw PIs right into next week, AVN doesn't give a rat's ass. about that. So it might as well go private and benefit from the advantages laid out above.

(I'm still not sure how it's going to go about raising more much needed funding though...)

Rom...

" If nothing else we are in good company because these creditors also paid a high price for the equity."

Very true. The bondholders involved in the D4E swap effectively exchanged roughly $500m of interest-bearing bond-based debt for roughly 2 billion shares (in back of a fag packet calculations).

So they "paid" 25 cents a share. Call that 20p a share, then compare and contrast to today's share value.

"To flush us away for good they need to relinquish their shareholding too. Maybe they can roll it into the remaining debt but that is far above my pay-grade?"

I can't believe that the institutions are going to look for an Equity for Debt swap, having only agreed the very painful reverse 18 months ago? Plus don't forget that the self-same institutions are still into AVN for a further c. $500m of interest-bearing bond-based debt. Can't see them wanting to advance further borrowing via an E4D swap?

Which then raises the issue that AVN is now only capable of raising funding via private borrowing...

It'd be a very brave day trader who bought in right now, that's for sure.

In less than a month's time, AVN is going to be the Hotel California for PIs... they can check out any time they like, but they can never leave.

A slight update to earlier posting.

This is going to go through almost without doubt.

The ten largest institutions hold 85% of AVN current shares - and the biggest 5 hold 75%.

The three biggest - Solus, Black Rock and Great Elm - hold 62% between them and they've already confirmed approval of the delisting. Just 13% more needed then.

That won't come from the existing directors though, who according to today's RNS only hold a staggeringly small 179,000 shares between them (or just 0.01% of overall AVN shares only worth a couple of thousand pounds). That is surprisingly tiny? Guess they never felt that a buy-in would be worth it.

I agree with MTB - in my view PIs need to rush for the door while they still can. Or risk being stuck with funds locked up in untradeable shares in an ongoing information vacuum.

AIMO.

Yes PIs (and everyone else) will still hold shares. Yes they could theoretically relist at a later date. Yes they could theoretically get bought out while unlisted.

It'll be very tricky to trade in AVN shares (either buying or selling) if this goes through. And of course remaining holders won't be entitled to see nearly as much news or as many announcements if the company goes private.

I doubt they'll drop down to the NEX exchange. Liquidity/tradeability there is almost as non-existent as it is for a private company - and being listed on NEX does nothing for company credibility either. If anything, it'd be worse than going private IMO. NEX is not referred to as the lobster pot for nothing - investors can get in, but very rarely get out.

I don't buy what the BoD is saying. They're *****ing about the MCap being too low - and conveniently forgetting that the MCap is defined by the market, which looks at fundamentals such as P&L, balance sheet etc etc.

All that taking AVN private is going to do is save a bit of annual cost (no bad thing, I suppose) and also remove much of the need for disclosure. I don't think it's going to do anything for the company's credibility - in fact, quite the reverse.

Having said that, following the PI-crippling factor 15 D4E swap last year, it is indeed true that the vast majority of AVN shares are held by a small number of institutions, like Mast and the other holders of those bonds swapped for shares. And it's pretty much the same outfits that hold the remaining c. $500m of bond-based debt, so on that basis FROM A VERY GENERAL VIEWPOINT, this doesn't change the price of cocoa that much.

It is undoubtedly another kick in the teeth for remaining PIs though, although they only - I reckon - account for less than 7.5% of AVN's total shareholding. That's still £2 million potentially in private hands... and probably once worth many multiples of that. Not nice for long-suffering PIs to see impending illiquidity on those holdings.

Hopefully GCCRa won't now dare to come back yet again with his 865th "strong buy" recommendation - and if AVN does go off-market, at least fresh PIs won't have the opportunity to get suckered in. Got to be thankful for small mercies...

This is so murky and shaky now that I am pulling my buy order. Georgie's not playing ball with his buy-in (unsurprising, given what he knows, I suspect) and I don't want to become an accidental LTH like Will. He can check out any time he likes - but he can never leave.

They did both strongly hint, suggest and act as if that was the case... that the £2.5 million that Angs received along with Saltfleetby for their £1 expenditure was theirs to spend on whatever they liked.

Anyone with some judicious cynicism (which let's face it has always been needed when analysing whatever Angs says, given its continuous track record of shall we say "over-egging the pudding") knew that the OGA was bound to compel whoever acquired Saltfleetby to keep the decomissioning funds ring-fenced and effectively in escrow. This was always very obvious and the Angs BOD equally obviously knew this from the start, despite how it tried to make things look.

Just for the record, gents, I got doxxed (look it up if you don't know) ages ago, solely courtesy of my (brief) membership of and communication with the inner circle of the SAG - which just went to show the agendas of certain individuals within that. However, it's hardly a drama so I'm not at all sure what the more recent excitement is meant to be about?

Anyhow, re CTAG, I've decided to take Green Day's advice, so on that basis:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU9JoFKlaZ0

GL to the genuine.

"We are probably one of few real RED HOT PENNY SHARES but how do we prove it?"

Only one way. Cast-iron monetization of the capacity already in place to a sufficient level (that level being at the very least enough to cover debt-servicing payments out of gross margin without causing slippage into a pre-tax loss).

So basically... AVN nees to sell (a lot) more of what it currently has and is funding. It's that simple... nothing else will do.

Fortunately KW very obviously knows this already - and it's now a race between his driving of the company in far more sensible directions versus the debt millstone.

AIMO.

Power, one admittedly negative school of thought is that, following the successful launch of Hylas 3, there is very liable to be a final payment clause in the contract to the tune of a few million dollars once the satellite has been shown to be fully functional and properly in its specified geostationary orbit for thirty days. That was certainly the case with Hylas 4 - and if true, capex spending isn't quite over yet.

Plus on top of that, some may be thinking that the last thing AVN needs now is the operational costs relating to a fourth satellite in its fleet, when it's not got anywhere near selling even 50% of the capacity of the first three...

As ever with this outfit, it's a case of wait and see.

Could be, GCCRa...

...except you've been proven utterly and entirely wrong, the last 863 times you've assured everyone of the exact same thing.

Looking at recent SP movement, it looks like the guy I was speaking to a couple of weeks back who said it'd be better for AVN if H3 didn't launch might have had a point after all...