The latest Investing Matters Podcast with Jean Roche, Co-Manager of Schroder UK Mid Cap Investment Trust has just been released. Listen here.
Hi Walkietalkie :)
MIRI isn't for a short-term trade its a buy now & hold for the re-rating that will come. I've just posted some research on it since friday night.
Absolutely worth your time going through the links in them, you'll understand the business much better from those blog posts.
There maybe a capital raise in June, but I'm getting the feeling the product is changing the advertising landscape so much in the USA that the £££'s are rolling in quicker than we can see. Wish I had the Q1 numbers but still waiting on last years annual report 1st of all although we know roughly the cash & revenue numbers.
I'm going to really stick my neck out & say its Market Cap is going to increase at least 10 fold from here inside the next 2 years (provided it doesn't get taken out before then) ie from £9M to over £100M & Yes I'm pretty confident that will happen, but you still need to do your own research etc.
Good luck with your choices
LOTM
On a footnote I've managed to find out the Autobrands article was from 28th March 2024
https://blog.mirriad.com/virtual-product-placement-and-brand-awareness
And the https://blog.mirriad.com/virtual-product-placement-in-cultural-events was from 11th March 2024.
This is earlier https://blog.mirriad.com/virtual-product-placement-music-videos - AT&T amongst others although I think its probably from Q4 2023.
LOTM
I think these are a really good read for anyone new or just starting to look at Mirriad. Seriously worth taking the roughly 15 mins to read them.
https://blog.mirriad.com/mirriad-expands-vpp-reach-new-partnerships
https://blog.mirriad.com/using-virtual-product-placement-to-solidify-your-brand-voice
https://blog.mirriad.com/virtual-product-placement-and-brand-awareness (this one is about Auto Brands highlighting both Lexus & Nissan) Having just viewed it, it would appear that there has been a lot more VPP (Virtual Product Placement) going on than we realised, I'm guessing in Q1 2024.
https://blog.mirriad.com/the-advantages-and-challenges-of-virtual-product-placement
Having read them, I'll be buying more early next week.
LOTM
Mirriad worked with L’Oreal’s Mugler fragrance brand to place a virtual billboard featuring spokesperson Hunter Schafer from the HBO show Euphoria in the new video for hip-hop star Coi Leray’s song Players celebrating female empowerment.
https://blog.mirriad.com/virtual-product-placement-in-cultural-events
Here they go into the details even more (yes it is from October 2023) but shows where they were heading
https://www.nexttv.com/news/mirriad-inserts-virtual-billboard-for-mugler-into-coi-leray-video
2phevs & MrTaylor194
You didn't happen by chance to get to see the results of that Kantor study ? I clicked on the link but sadly it goes back to a 2022 study not the video data :(
hmm this might be the data although I came across it looking for something else
https://info.mirriad.com/hack-to-the-future
Its well worth playing the Mirriad video at the bottom :)
LOTM
New Job - Senior Health and Safety Scientist.
Past Job History
pHion Therapeutics Graphic
Senior R&D Technician
pHion Therapeutics
Jul 2023 - Present 10 months
Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Fusion Antibodies Graphic
Senior Technician
Fusion Antibodies
Mar 2022 - Jul 2023 1 year 5 months
Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Queen's University Belfast Graphic
Research Assistant
Queen's University Belfast
May 2015 - Apr 2022 7 years
Interesting comments re the latest re-hire ........
Paul Warwick
Sales Director Ohrid Organics
8h
This must imply an improvement in the business recovery. Happy days. About time the investors stopped selling their shares.
Like
Reply
Lyndsey Cusick
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9h
Congratulations 🎉 in your new role Conor. Glad to see you back 😊
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Cian McCrudden
Head of Vaccine Development at pHion Therapeutics Limited
11h
Congratulations Conor!
Hi saxman303
It's always hard to say what a share price is going to do in the short term especially if there is a seller out there for whatever reason & yes at the moment I do believe they are going to need more funds to see them through to break-even. I'm currently looking at a figure of £5M but I'll be adjusting that once we get an idea of how Q1 went. If there on a really good growth curve they may well be able to borrow some of that money, or issue a 1 year loan note with a high interest rate of say 15% just to get them to that break-even point.
I've just been buying small amount to try & get a decent average price, ahead of the next piece of news which could drop in any day now & could be the catalyst for the shares re-rating substantially.
So far I've bought 600,000 shares & I've got an average price of about 2.075p a share. My intension is to get that up to 1M shares in the coming days. As I free up cash from elsewhere because this could take off at any time.
If things are on course with the numbers, then I'll be buying a lot more than that, I'm trying not to get to excited about it because I do see massive potential for a multibagger here but I want the numbers to do the talking.
If you go by there previous numbers then by 2026 there is no reason for this not to be valued at 10 times the current market cap, but they need to show that the margin can be maintained & the take-up of the product offering is on or close to plan. That is what we're currently lacking, as well as investors simply not knowing about the company, its product & potential.
There is of course the possibility of a take-over offer at some point ( I hope not in the next year plus) but if the product is so disruptive & beneficial to advertisers then why wouldn't a bigger player want to own & control that technology & patents.
Good Luck
LOTM
So LAS itself is virtually totally risk averse.
So Stonehage Fleming Inv Mgt which own 8.81% of LAS (just over 7.5M shares) has its money tied up there doing zero for them basically, year in year out while John & the rest of the board rake in £1M a year now (oh & I forgot John get's £10,000 from Dragon as well - that will help pay for the holiday no doubt).
I'm not sure how many actual staff LAS employ themselves or size of salaries etc.
Stonehage Fleming Inv Mgt own 17.95% of BISI which is 1,916,154 shares. So they have been getting some income from that, but whose going to want to buy there shares stuck in this structure with mine-life dwindling etc?
How much did both investments cost them in the 1st place ?
So in summary the 40%+ of cash that was originally invested by outsiders in LAS is doing nothing for its holders other than pay 40%+ of Directors salaries etc. Then on top of that amount of cash, the outside investors in Bisichi are very much in the same boat, only they are getting a dividend most of the time, but that hides the fact that the directors are milking a fortune off it, sucking the pot dry without virtually any skin in the game.
The only saving grace for the outsider shareholders was the sharp spike in the price of coal which brought a considerable sum of money into the business & they got a decent return for once, but it will be back to crumbs for them, while the directors milk the pot dry again slowly but surely year after year.
Some outsider shareholders might have got lucky & got out when the opportunity arose (surprised Stonehage Fleming Inv Mgt didn't sell a good chunk of there holding - or maybe they did - I didn't look for it historically but could find enough buyers for the rest). In the meantime that 40%+ of the original outside money in Bisichi is again being used to finance the Hellier Empire & repayment on it can't be demanded etc unlike the bank lenders etc who can do that.
LOTM
Gtc1507,
I don't mind re-hire's as these are people that already have an understanding of the business & in one way is positive.
What I'm not liking is the job titles etc of the re-hires.
It looks to me that the company has no understanding of business in the real world.
There are simply far to many managers & senior staff for the size of the business. There are only 28 employees for goodness sake & it looks like 3 or 4 layers of management. There shouldn't be any more than 4 in management, 1 senior 3 under them & all the staff under them.
No wonder there isn't much work getting done, there's no actual workers to create the actual product !!!
Maybe the company is offering excessive salaries compared to others round about ? hence the returns
LOTM
Hi EdwardSeaton,
So looking at LAS or (LAP as it likes to be known).
John Hellier gets a basic salary of £558,000 + £38,000 of benefits & another £33,000 for pension as opposed to Andrew Hellier's basic salary of £495,000 + £42,000 in benefits.
John Hellier owns 1,872,410 LAS shares, Sir M Hellier & family owned 48,080,880 LAS shares that's 56.35% of LAS ( I can't tell if that figure actually includes John's holding or is completely separate to it). I also noted that Stonehage Fleming Inv Mgt own 8.81% of LAS (just over 7.5M shares).
LAS own's 41.52% of Bisichi
Within Bisichi - Sir M Hellier's estate owns 3.09% of the company (330,117 shares) & Andrew Hellier separately owns 7.35% of the company (785,012 shares) I'm again noting Stonehage Fleming Inv Mgt own 17.95% of BISI which is 1,916,154 shares.
So the Hellier family in essence control 51.96% of Bisichi (41.52% + 7.35% + 3.09% ).
I'm not entirely sure why Bisichi is incorporated into LAS's accounts given it is only 41.52% owned by that entity I would have expected ownership to be over 50% before they needed to be added in so that complicates things even more & then you've got Dragon as well ! a 50/50 split between the 2.
So that's going to need to be looked into in a lot more detail to try & work out what's what.
What is clear is that LAS doesn't like using its own cash, it likes to use borrowing's either from banks or from Bisichi.
Bisichi has a portfolio of properties that it owns (& has some borrowings against) valued at over £10M ( so effectively just under half of that investment is not from the Hellier family) It gets around £1.1M annual in rent from it (less interest on the bank loans), but it then pays LAS over £0.2M a year to manage that portfolio on its behalf !
Andrew Hellier has an outstanding loan of £42,000 from Bisichi ! Yet didn't re-pay it when receiving £1.6M+ in salary plus dividends on top of that !
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They simply want to make enough money each year to get a handsome salary for themselves at the expense of those invested with them, whose money gives them virtually no return on it be it dividends or capital appreciation.
LOTM
Hi Stampee1,
No timeline as yet.
I will be pressing them for the release of monthly key indicators so that share holders have a good idea of how things are progressing.
Just bought that other 100,000 at 1.74p I had put a limit order in earlier for them at 1.76p but it never got filled for some reason :( maybe because the offer didn't fall below it.
LOTM
Hi Stampee1,
Its not actually $1.7 Billion.
If you go deeper they are saying 25% goes into digital advertising so lets call it $400M or £320M to be safe. There was another article putting the sum in the segment that Mirraid is interested in at $100M so lets call that £80M.
If Mirriad through the "Diverse Supplies Marketplace" & Virtual Product Placement combined got even 10% of the £80M that's £8M of which we'd get £2M or £1M net which would be 10% of what the company needs Annually to break-even!
LOTM
Https://www.statista.com/statistics/286518/toyota-advertising-spending-worldwide/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20Toyota%20Motor%20Corporation%20invested%201.7%20billion,U.S.%20dollars%20in%20advertising%20activities%20across%20the%20globe.
"In 2021, Toyota Motor Corporation invested 1.7 billion U.S. dollars in advertising activities across the globe. Roughly a quarter of the figure was invested in digital advertising"
"In 2022, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota allocated a whopping 1.55 billion U.S. dollars for advertising in the United States, securing the third position among leading auto manufacturers in terms of advertising expenditure1. This substantial investment underscores Toyota’s commitment to promoting its brand and vehicles.
Moreover, in 2021, Toyota Motor Corporation’s global advertising spending reached 1.7 billion U.S. dollars2. Clearly, Toyota doesn’t hold back when it comes to spreading the word about their cars and innovations."
Hi EdwardSeaton,
The directors paid themselves a bonus of £2.611M in 2022. (just to put that in context that is more than the shareholders received in total dividend for the year 22p per share at a cost to them of £2.348M)
1 of the Executive directors doesn't own a single share in the company, another just 40,000 shares & they have base salaries of around £200,000 per year.
They'll tell you how well the company performed & they should be awarded accordingly. Well the honest truth is the company didn't perform in 2022, they only reason they made so much money was the massive increase in the price of coal which is totally out of there control.
What was in there control was mining output - although they use outside contractors to do the mining which obviously increases the cost of it. Output fell, there were issues, poorly selected ground for stripping etc & in the first half of 2023 they ran into more issues around a fault which if they'd test drilled it right they would have known about it.
So did they deserve a bonus on that basis? I'd say maybe a small one at best given the largeness of there base salaries. If they'd got £0.5M between them I'd have said they'd done pretty well for themselves, all things considered. That would have given them another £2M to either pay as a dividend 20p per share or "invest" in the market, heaven's forbid.
There is simply no way they should have walked away with more of a reward than those who fund the company & have there cash at risk. end of story, totally disgraceful & contemptable.
They must be laughing every day about how lucky they are with this wonderful set-up no risk & just a gravy train.
I'll have a deeper look at LAS before passing any comment in that direction.
LOTM
Going back to the Toyota news & thinking about it financially etc.
So the ad campaign results are compelling from Toyota's point of view & with that in mind there is no way that they haven't sat down since they got them & adjusted there ad budgets going forward.
I have no idea as to exactly how much they spend internationally on advertising per year but I'm sure it will be north of £10M. I also don't see a scenario now, where they are allocating anything less than 20%+ of there ad budget to virtual product placement, it might even get 40% of the annual budget in time.
So going on £10M & 20% through virtual product placement gives it £2M effectively going through Mirriad & Mirriad will get 25% of that according to what we've been told, so that works out at £0.5M minimum from Toyota alone & if I then say the net profit margin on it is 50% to be conservative, that would give us £0.25M net.
If we say the company's annual costs are £10M, then that sum would equate to 1/40th of the amount Mirriad needs to break-even or 2.5%.
What I am surprised about is Toyota making public how well this form of advertisement has done for the business. I think they've made a big mistake in doing so. Although it should be fabulous from Mirriad's point of view, because all of those competing directly with Toyota or are just below them or above them price point wise, will be worried as heck about losing market share to them.
They will virtually become compelled to get onboard with Mirriad's offering to negate the advantage Toyota now has over them.
A lot for people to think about especially when you take in all the other car company's out there & the size of all there annual ad budgets ........ £££££
GLA
LOTM
I was looking at the presentation again last night & the following struck me ........ on page 5
" 9/10 US Entertainment majors are now working, negotiating, or testing with Mirriad "
So back in August only 1 of the top 10 wasn't at least talking to Mirriad ( be that NBCU, Fox or Disney ).
We know they are close to sealing a deal with one of them, with Fox being the most likely, but possibly NBCU. So which other one has changed there mind since August & backed off from Mirriad & why?
From the Jan update "The Company is in active negotiations with two more majors in the US representing an additional 30+% of potential market share, and there is the prospect of further notable additions in the first half of 2024."
There are now less than 75 days left in the 1st half of the year & you'd have to say none of these "notable additions" has surfaced to date. So we maybe in for a stream of announcement in the next few weeks.
GLA
LOTM
Sorry been out all day & didn't get home in enough time to buy that next 100,000 :( oh well at least I'll be around all day tomorrow :)
My post from last night got cut short :( as I obviously over filled the messages limit.
It was meant to say at the end ........
Given all of the above I can see them raising the required cash to see us to break-even & beyond in early June& at the moment I don't see the raise being any more than £5M.
Hopefully in a way that doesn't cause any dilution or allow's existing share holders to maintain there current % ownership of the company if they so wish.
LOTM
Hi LoveableLumax & Merciaman,
I have thought from very early on since my arrival (actually knowing about Mirriad) that another round of funding was going to be needed at some point this year.
This is what the figures & information they've said point to .......
On 30th June 2023, they had £9.8M in the bank & they've stated the 31st December figure is roughly £6.1M, that's a decrease of £3.7M. There new business plan initially runs until 31st Aug 2024 & during that time they have budgeted for month expenditure to be £0.7M per month or £4.2M every 6 month's.
The figures therefore show that the cash balance at 31st Dec was £0.5M higher than budget (ie £3.7M drop instead of £4.2M).
Revenue during the 1st half of 2023 was £0.574M & they have said it was roughly £1.8M for the whole year ie so £1.226M in the 2nd half.
Now there will be delays in turning that gross revenue into actual cash in the company's bank account, I've modelled it with a 2 month delay. One research report expected the net margin to be 85%, I've used a 75% figure until the year end accounts come out & we may have a better understanding of what the figure is in reality.
For now the sums are small & it doesn't make that much of a difference, going forward it will be much more important for knowing when the company will first of all be break-even on an EBITDA basis, then a EBIT basis, then breakeven financially on a month by month basis & finally making a meaningful profit.
I'm hoping we get Q1 numbers along with the annual results, to re-affirm where the cash balance is & what Q1 gross sales were. I've projected Q1 sales to be only £0.945M against £0.845M in Q4.
I got to that figure by looking at when new contracts were signed datewise etc & deciding that revenue wouldn't really ramp-up until late Nov/Dec 23. So my Jan figure is significantly less than the Dec one & roughly the same as the Nov one, then increases slowly through Feb & Mar & in actual fact it won't top the Dec number until Apr (and only just that month)to factor in the ad cycle which has much lower ad spending in Q1 each year.
The company has said it was doing slightly better than it expected in the 2nd half of 2023, however I suspect due to the number of new agreements signed & the implementation of them, that spending will be speeded up to get them to market & earning us money faster to.
So I suspect we'll have ended Q1 with a cash balance of perhaps £3.5M instead of the £4.0M the business plan would point to.
I'd say its pretty clear that adverts are appearing a lot more often in the past month than previously & therefore we should be starting to see a lot more revenue being generated for the company. This will help to slow the monthly cash burn.
There is also the Olympic & Para-Olympic games coming up in Q3, that should cause a significant increase in ad spending.
Given all of the above I can see them raising the required cash to see us to break-even & beyond