Member Info for HeadInTheSand

Recognition does not even come into it in the murky world of AIM finance, IMV, Dougal.

So if it ever did come good - and you know my thoughts on that - it would have to involve a simply massive existing PI dilution. However else could Amit raise any more funding? Plus, he got given the authority (on the famous show of hands) to issue simply bucketloads of new shares entirely at his discretion....

IMV the only news that could possibly make a substantive difference to BBB's share price is information on either:-

Fixed wireless contract wins in Yorks/Lincs (where the Quickline WISP acquisition operates)

Sat contract wins in appropriate territories (which would be Australia - though I'm not sure there's much more for BBB to do there - maybe the Nordics and definitely the old Eastern bloc).

On the other side of the scales, we have the fact that the Sales Director recently bailed out and flogged his share options - hardly confidence inspiring.

I'm also nervous of the next set of financials and specifically, OpEx vs revenue levels, plus overall customer base churn levels. Primarily through aggressive - and IMO suprisingly high-priced subscriber base acquisition - BBB recently got themselves up to around 121,000 subscribers I think, but then flogged off 11,000 Aussie fibre customers at bargain basement price. So, at that point (April 18, from memory?), they should have been at a subscriber base of c. 110,000 and thus one would hope a fair few thousand more by now, via natural endemic growth...

My fear is, once detail is announced, that those overall subscriber base numbers will have gone notably south, and so putting significant pressure on funding/cashflow/opex. I don't believe that BBB has any chance in the short- to mid-term future of adding customers on newer and more desirable technology as quickly as it's bound to be losing customers on VSAT in its core revenue-producing Western European markets.

I guess we'll see soon enough. AIMO.

Geez... JSmith, although BBB is a semi-tech business, these are not difficult questions, the answers to which you could easily work out yourself.

What it means? Upside? None - BBB doesn't do fibre. Downside? Once the Shetlands is fibre-enabled (if this goes ahead), BBB can kiss goodbye instantly to any VSAT customers it's got there, which is probably a fairly trivial number.

JSmith all it basically means is that there's a government strategy around providing 100% connectivity to every UK premises by either fibre or 5G.

What does that mean to BBB? Nothing short- to mid-term (though it's another clear nail in the coffin of satellite broadband technology in developed markets). Long-term? Although BBB have no interest in fibre (in fact they flogged their Aussie fibre customers a short while back), they have started to dabble very recently in 4G and 5G - very bit late in the day and they're at least a year behind their UK competition, but better late than never.

DougB hey, feel entirely free to choose your own acceptable timeframe or not - it's your money, after all.

I was just interested whether anyone of a more positive frame of mind (whether realistic or not) had set an eventual backstop/line in the sand at *any* future point. I can't see it as being reasonable for anyone to be prepared quite literally forever?

Devil's advocate time , because of course the above does then beg a very relevant and directly related question:-

So, say someone's set themselves a line in the sand of for example March 31st 2019, by which point if nothing's happened their attitude and positivity will change. They'll stop believing in possibilities.

All well and good - except if that self-decided point does come and go with no change, what is that someone then going to do that would be of any possible use?

I have no answers to any of the above.

So... is the general consensus from those of a more positive bent (and I offer no comment on how realistic or not such positivity may be) that PIs should patiently wait until end Q3 18? Or end H2 18? Or end H119?

Anyone care to specify an acceptable latest timeframe?

Dougb as you really ought to know, one man's foolish is another man's smart. I wouldn't say that my position is anything other than reflective of the facts on CTAG so far... and thus hardly foolish.

As to who penned this thread? Presumably an alter-ego of another ID, I'd guess. A mere two posts is always a giveaway, but I'm really not bothered as to who. Why would the identity of the poster affect the merit (or not) of what was posted?

Okay everyone on this BB knows that I am as cynical as they come on CTAG and ABH.

Having said that in advance, I can't help agreeing with everything posted in this thread so far - and especially with your opinion, Rktech. I doubt we'll be seeing WM on this BB again - the username itself seems to have been deleted - so it's either howling embarrassment or (much more likely IMV). It does indeed seem to be mission accomplished...

Time to move on for one and all I suspect. Nobody's seriously waiting for H2... then H1... then H2 again, are they?

For those who don't remember, Avonline Broadband was the 100% UK, 100% satellite broadband company acquired by BBB almost exactly 2 years ago. 10,000 satellite broadband customers for an eye-popping £10 million.

There's been some very hurried brand consolidation going on. Neither Avonline nor Europasat exist as separate brand names or websites any more. Both get piped through to Big Blu's UK website.

If ever you wanted a clear indication that BBB is looking as fast as possible to portray itself as a multiple technology company, then that's it.

Trouble is, looking at the UK and W. Europe (and France in particular) a remarkably high proportion of BBB's overall global revenue (nigh on 50%, from memory, but I may be wrong) is coming from satellite broadband customers - all of whom are unsurprisingly churning as soon as they can over to alternate faster/better/cheaper technologies that either have become or are becoming available.

So, as I've said before, BBB finds itself in a race. Can it replace fast-shrinking sat revenues quick enough with other tech so as not to leave a great big cashflow/funding hole?

dsb, I'm not going to split hairs with you - in my definition, FWA is a non-terrestrial technology (obviously), although in needs terrestrial backhaul from somewhere (equally obviously).

I think BBB is late in the game realising how much of a "last resort" satellite broadband has become, which is proving difficult for them, since the vast majority of their traditional core business was entirely satellite broadband based. They're clearly diversifying (although not into fibre, which is fine) as fast as they can... but it's late in the day. They just didn't see the very rapid rise of alternative and far better fit for purpose technologies coming.

For the same reasons, I also suspect over the last few years they've paid far FAR too much per subscriber for satellite customer acquisition - certainly in the UK and Western Europe. This goes right back to the price they paid for Avonline and there have been several smaller but still hugely costly acqusitions since. If churn on satellite broadband is as high as I am sure it is - as users in developed markets migrate away from it as soon as literally any other broadband technology (FTTP, FTTC, FWA, 4G) is available - then I can't see how BBB are ever going to break even against the prices paid for any of those acquisitions.

They need to push evolution and diversification as fast as possible in order to replace lost satellite revenue and avoid opex/cashflow strains. I'm almost certain they won't be able to do this quickly enough to avoid another placing or two to raise money purely for opex funding in the short- to mid-term, as they try to remodel their core business.

AIMO.

WO, I very largely agree with you and your analysis - and "wait and see", at least till the end of July, is all that can realistically be done. I'm duty-bound to state that I'm very definitely less optimistic than you in terms of outlook.

Also agreed that many VSAT operators - including AVN - have made the self-same "if we build it, they will come" wrong assumption. At least H4 is over a geography where it has some chance of making a degree of commercial sense though, but to me, the question for AVN remains, is it too little, too late to make up for all the dramatically missed commercial assumptions that have dogged AVN almost from the get-go? They've certainly hit and in many cases exceeded all their expenditure forecasts, but to date haven't got anywhere near hitting the resultant essential revenue/GP targets... hence the ongoing flaky state they find themselves in.

We'll just have to see how this plays out over the next 10 or so weeks.

AIMO.

Yes dsb, that new Ofcom relaxation shouid definitely make things easier for WISPs like Quickline - it allows a much more commercially efficient use of spectrum.

Chesh, no this doesn't mean that BBB will be taking on BT or Virgin in any way at all. BBB is not interested at all in terrestrial broadband supply - at least currently. Their recent flogging off of 11,000 Aussie fibre customers and associated network infrastructure for £76 per customer is a clear indicator of this, if one is needed,

Beebop, if Chesh can get a max 18Mbps unlimited broadband service down a terrestrial ADSL2 line, there is no way on God's green earth that he should even begin to consider satellite broadband. Even if he could get the alleged theoretical max poossible speeds of 30Mbps as per Avanti's superfast service (which it never gets anywhere close to delivering in a real-world environment), data restrictions, latency and cost per GB consumed all mean that he'd be massively disappointed, if not seriously peed off.

Satellite broadband remains very firmly the option of absolute last resort - which is why its churn stats are so ever-increasingly high across W. Europe at least.

AIMO.

Brooko, I don't see why you seem to think that anyone deramping ANGS would expect that in any way to help *raise* an alternative Weald oiler's SP?

IMV all Weald oilers are of course at this early stage highly cash-consumptive, sentiment-driven and speculative and all prone to bouts of deliberately overly positive spin from their respective BoDs as they look to raise more funds in an effort to reach self-financing status.

Having said that and FWIW, leaving Tidswell and 2030gate to one side as a largely done issue, ANGS' treatment of its shareholders seems to be notably more gentle and less "shafty" than what's recently been going on with SS and his mates' rates deals at UKOG.

The latter's a day trader's dream at the moment - SP up and down faster than a busy lady of the night's lingerie. ANGS LTHers should be grateful that this share isn't usually - Tidswell cock-ups aside - like that.

AIMO.

Brooko, I don't deny having an interest in more than one Weald oiler, but I don't think there's necessarily a direct correlation of competence between SS's nudge nudge wink wink word to the wise fund-raising over on UKOG and what's going on with ANGS. At least I bloody well hope not.

Well, yes... except no.

BBB have purchased in around 25,000 "new" customers since Nov 17 (4k as per the SAT 6/11/17 RNS and 21,000 as per the SAT 26/4/18 RNS).

Their spend acquiring these Western European satellite broadband customers seems to have been around £12 million, looking at those two RNSes - so this values those customers at an average of £480 each, which to me seems eye-poppingly high. Anyhow...

We're told that, prior to the recent Aussie fibre customer disposal, they had 123,000 customers. Therefore, the 25k customer acquisitions mentioned above represented a 25.5% increase on the original 98,000 customer base, prior to Nov 17.

On that basis, I should bloody well hope that their "recurring revenue" went up by c. 20%. It should have gone up more than 25%, and that's even if their own core non-acquired customer number had merely remained static. And the reason it didn't? In my view, the only possible explanation is the high level of churn on satellite broadband in Western European markets

Since that point as we know, BBB has flogged off 11,000 Aussie fibre customers for AUD 1.5 million, which equates to about £76 per customer as a sales value.

Sorry, but it really doesn't look great to me...

AIMO.

That's the wrong America2030. Some think that Tidswell made the same mistake you just have. Me? I think he knew exactly what he was doing...

Brooko, what has the credibility (or not) of the CEO at an alternative Weald oiler and the decisions made by the BOD over there got to do with this bizarre series of events at ANGS? Nothing, that's what.

Urgent clarification RNS please, with full disclosure, so things can hopefully return to something approaching normal.

I'm actually staggered that anyone is prepared - even for a microsecond - to believe that Tidswell got "scammed" into giving his shares away for nothing, or that he accidentally confused one company with another of similar name. That just hasn't happened - or if it has, the guy shouldn't be allowed near a pair of pointy-ended scissors, let alone the BOD of a listed plc.

Nope, I'm sure that this was a quite deliberate and planned act on Tidswell's part, with the only big question being "Why???"

I have my own ideas on that, but that's irrelevant. Without the slightest doubt, what's now most urgently needed is a full and frank disclosure from ANGS and its Nomad via RNS explaining all the whys and wherefores within this lamentable event, before more collateral damage is done to the SP. Then at least everyone can return to focussing on what should be the core issues, opportunities and indicators.

AIMO.

GCCRa, perhaps if you grow up, you'll be able to take part at least to a small extent in a reasoned and adult discussion of issues on a stock such as AVN.

Your trite, childish and moronically misplaced insults against those who bother dealing in facts rather than immature and blinkered assumption shed a far more laughable light on you than on your intended targets - but that's something that it takes a little smarts and a lot more maturity to understand. I won't be holding my breath for the penny to drop for you any time soon.

Anyhow back to the adults - Blowntobits, good post below and I take the point re Q3, but like you, I think PIs at this stage deserve a lot more clarity than having to read between the lines.

I agree. If:-

1. there is so much potential according to SS...
2. the SP is therefore so undervalued...
3. riches are just around the corner...
4. the company was fully funded for the entirety of 2018 before the first £5 million placing...
5. the company was thus massively awash with contingency funds following the £5 million placing...

...why the Hell has a further dilutative £2 million been raised at this rock-bottom time, when all that jam is jsut around the corner and the company's already got bucketfuls of spare cash? Answers on a postcard please.

What I also find interesting is how legendary ramp king David Lemongrass went into social media ramptastic overdrive just before these recent two placings. It's almost as if he knew exactly what SS was up to and was trying his level best to help get the placings away, but of course that can't possibly be true...

(AIMO, but really trying to keep a straight face here....)