Member Info for LOTM-13

Hi Walkietalkie,

Well I've completely sold out of SYNT ahead of the update tomorrow.

I believe they are going to say that 2024 has started disappointingly & that its going to be at Q2 before an upturn occurs, which is the same as the other USA chemical company's have been pointing to.

I could be wrong, just like I was selling GENL last Thursday & not buying some HE1 either on Friday morning or this morning!

Such is life.

Good luck with your decision.

LOTM

I was thinking about the pre-close update over the weekend & actually its quite scary when you put 2 & 2 together.

You go back to the half year report from 14th September (which is just over 4 months ago) & back then they were forecasting production for the year at the bottom end of there previous range of 32-36,000 boepd exiting 2023 at over 34,000. Now this new guidance was a mark down of expectations.

Yet in the pre-close announcement, production came in at just 30,222 boepd for 2023 (roughly 2,000 boepd below the forecast in just 3 months timewise).

Further more the "Teen and Badr El Din (BED) LLP projects are now complete and beginning to ramp up" ( they were part of the reason they were forecasting the 34,000 exit rate that we ended up over 10% below)

Now even with those projects factored (and not reached peak production yet) in Capricorn are indicating that production for 2024 is likely to decline by 20 - 30%.

That's 20-30% on 30,222 boepd not the original range they expected but missed considerably & its also after taking into account "flush" production from the recently added wells.

Pretty scary stuff when you think about the company's future & how quickly production might fall in 2025 also & how they turn things around on the development side.

As I said not getting that November Presentation really does mean Shareholders are in the dark & not in a good way.

They have a lot of explaining to do.

LOTM

Hmm I wonder if there is director buying going on for it to open up so much in price while GKP virtually hadn't moved.

LOTM

FPSO started moving again about 07:00 GMT today Sunday 28/01 & is heading towards Senegal.

LOTM

Hi Walkietalkie

Your trading seems to be going well elsewhere!

Yet again I wasn't around when the price obviously dipped sharply this morning. I think there is a few £'s in your £1.35 purchase, its just a case of when you want to bank it.

I'm going to totally disagree with you about Tuesday, I will be selling a good few before then & taking a massive hit on them at the same time, probably wiping out all my banked profit to date & more!

If I'm wrong then I'll have to deal with the consequences of being so & how to get back in etc.

GMHK,

I'm not sure the charts will tell you much at this price, given the cliff SYNT fell from. There will be very little resistance if any on good news. The only thing you can be going by is the Fib % stuff & I doubt that landed precisely on £1.40 which has now been topped intra-day & we've hardly been down here long enough for it to be like the old £1.68 & £1.93's that we traded back & forth between.

Like you I'm very wary of Tuesday thou.

Sadly the 118 trade bot seems to have gone missing now, maybe it got tired out with all its activity yesterday !

Good luck all

LOTM

After reflecting overnight on the update, the biggest thing that is missing is an actual update on what was achieved in Egypt in 2023.

The postponement of the Egypt presentation at the end of November is in reality a major blow to investors, because we have no idea of what was achieved for the roughly $93M of Capex spent in Egypt in 2023.

There has been no drilling updates or detailed reports giving the licence name, the well, what was found, if so the flow test results & if its on production yet or not & one of the most important parts new reserve numbers

Yes there has been some snippets given to us, but not a real in depth insight into it all. Without that investors have no real idea if the money has been well spent or not.

From what I've read, it doesn't look like we've found that much in the way of new reserves. The more wildcat drilling side of things seems to have just turned up dry holes even with 3D seismic.

The only successes seem to have been step out wells from existing producing wells.

The long & short of it is this, if we don't have a baseline telling us what we have then its impossible to tell if we're actually making progress or not. Or if we are simply sending good money after bad & would be better off just producing what we've got (other than in-fill locations) & taking the money & running rather than spending it on Capex where we're losing it & getting no real return on it.

LOTM

Looking at the actual numbers,

Amount outstanding from Egypt $173M compared to $170M end Oct with $139M overdue at that point.

$190M in cash & loan debt of $114M compared to $158M with loan debt of $113M in Oct. So that's a gain of $32M in cash but when you take into account the Waldorf payment of $48M it means a spend of $16M in just 2 months ! plus another $1M loan increase. The buy-back would account for roughly $2M of that $17M spend.

Also Capex is meant to be around $120M which is in the bottom half of the $117M - $127M range from October (there wasn't a published Capex spend number to the end of October).

Not as rosy a picture as you might think.

LOTM

Hi Tenapenny,

If you add in the $28.5M that's to come from Waldorf over the next year & then payout the $37M still due to Shell over the same time period, You'll still come to roughly the same number.

Problem is Egypt lost money last year & still isn't break-even. There talking of possible production declines as high as 25% which certainly isn't good.

Its just as well they've cut G&A by $50M a year to just $20M now, but that is still going to eat into the cash pile, as is the Reserve based loan that needs to be paid off & if reserves are dropping the payments will jump considerably. Yes they have the cash set-aside to cover the capital costs, but you get into an ever decreasing circle.

As for payments from Egypt that outstanding number has grown considerably each quarter, this quarter's will see less growth only because production & thus revenue dropped a lot in Q4.

There are a lot of moving parts to the equation.

The fact there is still no new date for the investor update on Egypt isn't exactly a good sign.

Good luck

LOTM

I was away for a couple of hours, but looking at the trades that took place during that time, volume is considerably to the buy side, yet the MM's are clearly holding the price down & trying to slowly move it lower.

Just look at the trades just before 2PM around 30,000 bought the biggest ones at £1.40 yet the price went down.

So unless they fill whatever it is there doing right now, in the near future I don't see the price being allowed to move up. It will do its best to go lower.

Also worth noting SYNT effectively has joint brokers Morgan Stanley & JPMC (although Morgan Stanley seem to be the senior of the 2). They should have a slightly better understanding of the company than the other 9 who cover it. JPMC were the ones who came to the £3.00 number recently!

GLA

LOTM

GMHK,

Looks like you & I are going to be on different strategies then.

I've just sold my GENL holding & used some of it to buy another 5,000 SYNT shares that I intend to sell ahead of Tuesday!

GLA

LOTM

Hmm not the best of updates from Capricorn.

They are clearly trying to delay so many things to buy themselves time for hopefully the government to finally start paying off the massive arrears.

They deliberately didn't say how much of the $173M is overdue.

Looks like there trying not to pay-off the debt as quickly as would otherwise be the case, or the next payment & interest didn't arise until 1st Jan 2024.

As for the FPSO well it hasn't moved in 5 days now !

So either there is a problem with the vessel or they were ahead of schedule & are just passing time, not Capricorn's cost but the tugs with it will be costing a pretty penny every day to hire. So I'd have thought they would have wanted to get the journey done ASAP.

GLA

LOTM

PanamaPete,

That may or may not be true (NYSE purchases).

However the LSE is the company's main listing. As such they will be required to disclose to the LSE on a daily basis there purchases on which ever exchange or platform they occur.

As an example VMUK has to disclose its CDI purchases in Australia each & every day to the LSE.

So I wouldn't entertain the NYSE suggestion one little bit.

LOTM

This is the 3rd time Dec has responded recently to market movements.

On the 2 previous occasions, as well as the response there was also a substantial buy-back notice as well.

Today No buy-back notice & the company failed to buy in possibly 200,000 shares yesterday at a very low price.

That's the 2nd significant dip in just a few days that they've not used to buy-back stock very cheaply.

Until now I've not been concerned, however the failure of the board to back up its words with actions indicates to me that cash is a problem right now.

Lets see what the results in the next few days reveals.

LOTM

Company just announced the next dividend payment of £0.225 per share with an Ex-dividend date of 1st Feb 2023.

So the value of the offer will drop on that date from £10.286 rather than the £10.285 in the thread title (because of the extra 0.1p they are paying out in the next dividend due to there being less shares in issue now) to £10.061 per share.

Which is still a very hefty discount to the current share price.

GLA

LOTM

I have to say I'm on the disappointed side, I thought the cash position would be better than it is.

The cash-flow margin is clearly smaller than you think it is. Yes I know they had the bond interest to pay as well during that quarter.

Pipeline opening or the size of the award are the 2 possible catalyst's for the share price to increase substantially.

GLA

LOTM

They just changed the price target to reflect the RI, just as JP Morgan did as well.

New Targets from 4 Brokers in the last few days are as follows

UBS £1.55

JP Morgan £3.00

Barclays £4.16

Berenberg £4.20

7 other brokers follow the stock & no doubt will be issuing there views on it in the coming days.

LOTM

Hi GMHK,

No its Genel, an oil producer in Kurdistan with a UK listing, ticker is GENL

I'm expecting there results to be better than the market thinks even with the key export pipeline to Turkey currently shut off. Domestic oil sales are now boosting the bank balance. They also have a court case in Feb against the KRG/Iraq for the loss of an asset. If they win the case they could be awarded a very significant sum of money, given they've spent something like $1.5B buying the asset previously etc. I don't see any downside at this price only significant upside of multiple times the current share price.

LOTM

Hi GMHK,

Given 3 of the 4 Broker's price targets are way in excess of your number, I'd say workable is a bit of an understatement.

Still waiting on GENeL tomorrow before I decide if or what I'm going to do ahead of the trading update.

GLA

LOTM

Hi All,

Not sure why all the brokers are rushing to get out there assessments ahead of the update next week?

Its certainly not going to be very good but that was already highlight in mid November.

So surely the brokers would have been better waiting another week, get up to date numbers & issue your report based on that instead of all these early predictions. Just doesn't make sense to me.

LOTM

Turkey has its own problems with oil supply Tartine.

The ship Iran seized was bound for there & they have supply issues from Russia to content with now as well.

So they might actually be quite keen to get crude flowing again.

My mistake earlier got my dates mixed up thought today was Tuesday & its not ! Both the APIKUR meeting & the Genel update are both on Wednesday !

GLA

LOTM