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Wrong thread. Not a good look for accuracy from a PR firm. I can see why RUA dropped them as these kinds of administrative errors were common in their coverage of RUA back in the day.

That said, the existence of significant trades is still healthy.

Trades shown (in a lot of smaller stocks) with timestamps of just after 5pm appear to be a reflection of what has happened during the day. Some kind of settling of accounts, maybe market maker balancing or covering. I don’t personally think they are fresh transactions at that timestamp. Delayed trades normally show the actual time the trade happened.

Good to see the optimism from the board continues. The tone of these final results comments is a bit more upbeat than the recent trading update implied. Cash now 2/3 of the market cap. It also sounds more likely that they have a possible smaller competitor acquisition in mind. Usually, it’s been talk of doing one if they find something suitable.

They did go through a phase of PR sessions via Equity Development in 2022/23 and these were pretty robust arguments about the sum of the parts of the four main businesses. For example, the legacy royalties business just sits there earning £500k a year for barely any outlay. On a 10% yield basis alone, that’s worth £5M. All the other parts had very decent values but the problem then was most of it was subject to deals or trials being completed. Ultimately, the PR didn’t help. It probably just attracted investors who soon got impatient or disillusioned, not appreciating the nature of a medtech business (things take years but last years once obtained).

Anyway, whatever the pros and cons of PR, the businesses have since progressed, costs have been slashed and some meaningful deals have been done. So far, the market has not recognised the improvements. Rua has disappointed in the past and many are bruised. It needs more persuasion, perhaps by seeing the CM businesses continue to grow organically and add more contracts and customers. The real juice would come with a licence for the vascular/HV materials. Let us hope for these all to prevail.

The circumstances of RUA are they are negotiating with a handful of major medtech companies, mostly under NDA’s. None of those parties wants publicity until deals are signed off. I’m pretty sure that’s the reasoning behind the policy of not releasing any information until it’s official.

The company doesn’t need cash right now so the share price movements are just matters of supply and demand for shares and there won’t be much demand until more business is done. PR alone won’t cut it. If and when good deals are done, the share price should follow in time and some investor PR will be justified at that point since they will have something concrete to “sell” to investors.

Yes, for sure, deals have to happen (and trading to continue to grow). They’ve dropped plenty of messages to say they are negotiating on multiple fronts. They’ve also expressed frustration at the time these can take due to regulatory requirements. As you say, deals are needed to regain the trust you speak of so let’s hope something gets over the line soon.

Looks like one seller in size (£250k) followed by small panic sales.

One thing to remember with RUA is that the shareholder base is quite ancient. A lot of elderly legacy holdings as well as the Dowgate holding which is mostly discretionary for clients of theirs. As time passes, individuals die off and their executors most likely sell the holdings at market. The 250k this morning could easily be in that category. It’s still only £30k worth.

In reality, the main reason for the mid price move is because the chief MM (Cavendish) switched from bid to offer on the book after absorbing the sales, no doubt looking for buyers in the 11.5 zone. Until a deal gets announced for new business we will continue to bob along around 11p.

They’ve said they will announce deals when they happen. I distrust companies that keep updating with tidbits via twitter etc. as they are usually pumping up the price for their own ends. Let the company do the deals. Medtech is a long term business, everything is in years from research, development, regulation and finally contracts. Long term deals are the key.

The CM division has won a significant new contract within the last year worth £3.3M over 5 years. That was a significant event because it was with a second major player in the field of implantables. This was an excellent endorsement of RUA’s quality given the exhaustive auditing needed by the major and regulators to give RUA the go ahead. The market missed that in my opinion. You can argue if that is a communication failure but it suffered the same fate. A rush of buyers, mostly gamblers, playing momentum and selling out quickly. This seems to be the fate of AIM at the moment.

I know RUA have other such irons in the fire. They require exhaustive auditing by third parties. No doubt what the last RNS alluded to in terms of time needed to get things across the line in medtech.

And then there’s the heart valve leaflet material. The dark horse lurking out there.

Cavendish update maintains 180p target price, given potential untapped pipeline, Tier 1 and 2 client list, recurring revenues and expects cash to be over £8m next year. Market cap is only £12m so enterprise value is only £4m. Dividend yield around 4%.

All suggests a solid floor for the current share price.

If you read back across several RNS releases, you will see that RUA secured a second global CM client worth over £500k a year for 5 years (at least £3.3M over the piece). That has never been appreciated by the market (to date) but I value it because it is a tremendous endorsement of the CM operation. For a global outfit to trust one of their implantable products (regulated to the highest degree) to a small outfit like RUA is impressive.

Coloplast are big for RUA and that has built from the early days of RUA Medical but to snaffle another global was key to endorsing RUA and surely sends a positive signal to the industry at large.

I think it can be read from previous releases that they are working on another project. If they can hook another big fish, that would be excellent. This is just one of the categories of growth listed in the interims statement.

Apart from broadening the client base, RUA also seek to broaden the products they would like to make for their existing clients. That would seem to offer a lot of scope.

Then there is the development of products incorporating Elasteon. That’s pretty exciting because it would help eradicate complications that can arise in existing products that incorporate polypropylene. In the April update, the board clearly saw it as an exciting area being worked on.

All of this before any of the areas being worked on in the vascular and heart valve leaflet divisions.

I agree with you Investmaster. RUA have made the decision now to hit the market only when they have a sufficient weapon to surprise it with.

I don’t believe they would have done that unless they were confident they could deliver one or more of them. Everything they are currently involved in is dictated by regulation so we are all having to live by this slow process. The deals that happen though would be multi year and high margin.

What we know from recent updates are that there are several potentially meaningful things being worked on and that the negotiation process is long winded thanks to regulatory hoops to be jumped through. Also, since the market is giving no credit for any of this (an efficient market supposedly prices in such things), the board has said, sod it, the market can wait until we have a deal!

What is criminal is that we are still priced at the distressed fund raise level of 11p despite now being anything but distressed, having doubled the size of the CM business and secured a major new contract with another global worth £500k a year minimum in turnover (CM does gross margins around 80%).

Zero credit is also given to the likelihood of securing a licensing deal for the AurTex and vascular materials.

In 2023, before the £4M fund raise, the company had a business half its current size and was bleeding cash. Share price in region of 20p. Now, with the business in rude health, having signed up another major, bought an EU business for peanuts and progressed on all fronts, the market says 11p.

It’s a complete travesty and a failure of AIM to a provide an active market.

CTSFO, I would think the AurTex leaflet has easily covered 600M cycles by now.

In the April update, the talk was of characterisation testing of AurTex being near conclusion. This is concerned with chemical composition and is often a precursor to implantation trials. With heart valves, I am assuming the testing partner will be looking at an animal trial at some point. As Geoff Berg said, it’s a long process with the regulations and all, but it would be reasonable to believe that a major could get things moving through regulators a lot quicker than a minnow could.

Further to Langland’s post, the “division’s largest customer” we know to be Coloplast.

Also, the April trading update stated… “the Group is actively pursuing an opportunity to combine our textiles expertise with ElastEon to create a novel device for a global device company. This opportunity is only available due to the unique IP developed within the Group over the last few years.” I assume that refers to the same thing that Langland referenced from the Dec24 note.

The recent interim results referred to opportunities being “actively pursued” and that included

“…Introduce existing customers to RUA IP and technology to help develop next-generation devices...”

So, one day, Rodders!

That’s a conversation killer!

Hi Sam, yes, I agree that the website is a neglected area. It’s like they are not sure why they have one! They occasionally update for the AIM Rule 26 obligations but everything else just detracts from the business as it seems like nothing has been updated in the sparse “news” areas for ages. Their customers, old and potential, probably don’t need to refer to it, but it’s still a public face of the group that should be maintained in a good way, even if simply as a modern, shiny facade rather than an unused parking lot with weeds growing through the cracks.

Just to clarify, I do think that the company should hit the PR buttons at the right moment, but I would like that to be once it has something new and properly meaningful to broadcast, at a minimum with some new deals, major contracts and licensing arrangements across more than one of the divisions. Something for potential new investors to get their teeth into.

For now, the company can get on with securing those deals. Let’s hope they can accomplish them.

PR is a bit of a red herring here. The company has just said that it doesn’t want any speculative fluff in the public domain while they are negotiating important contracts or licences. I understand that this is not just for internal reasons but also because the majors they are talking to are somewhat sensitive and that’s why NDA’s are signed.

If it’s PR you want, there was plenty of that in the April trading update, in my opinion. Yet, for all the expectation arising from those April comments, the share price refused to budge so I can see why the company has now said they will keep schtum until they can announce actual deals. I think that probably suits the parties they are dealing with as well.

If you are optimistic, you could interpret the decision to announce only deals when done as a signal that the company confidently expects to be in a position to announce one or more of them in the near or medium future. Geoff Berg, in last week’s interims, hedged this “excitement” with “if successful”, but that seems a reasonable thing to say.

There is also the question of whether the bullish stock markets have finally filtered down to UK micro caps. There seems to be evidence in quite a few small shares popping upwards lately. It would be good to ride a wave of that kind over the next few months as RUA gets noticed by the riders. We will see.