Member Info for Lutra

Oldbrian - I presume you mean end of year 2021? I'm still on 2020 here!

Why?! As a R&D-led tech company, the company must keep up its commitment to R&D or it will be caught and overtaken. R&D as a proportion of cost-base may well fall, but absolute sums spent should continue to rise.

haggis, I sincerely hope that AFC continues to pay out £4m a year on R&D, rather than resting on its laurels at this stage in the game.

...or could it simply be the dilution inferred by the RNS? If I am reading this correctly, that's an additional 19.75m shares issued, which must be in the range of 10% of market cap. We've seen a (roughly) 10% drop in share price following the RNS, so that would seem about right. Also, Hanwha can start disposing of 7m of these shares as soon as it likes, if it is minded to do so, which would put further short-term pressure on the share price. There are strong long-term positives from this RNS, but I wouldn't have expected it have been good news for the share price this morning.

toneman, I agree to an extent, but for AFC, using the fuel cell to run a charger is simply meeting the most immediate area of demand. I would assume that other products will arise as other areas of demand kick-in. Shore-based provision for moored ships and construction-site gen-sets are probably next, then the longer-term demand for fuel cells in trucks, trains, ships and possibly eventually cars and planes. It's the same technology and you can't blame AFC for going after the immediate business in the short-term.

Colonel, I've been involved (on the periphery) of installation of EV chargers at three sites. One is installed and functional, but was limited to fewer charge points than desired, due to local grid insufficiency. One is installed but has been sitting inoperable for a year so far, waiting for a grid connection. The third has not been installed yet because of a dispute over wayleave permissions to enable a grid connection. Even the functional one will ration power between the available charging points, so charging times will be longer than might be ideal. All of these sites would have benefitted from the AFC approach - if it is deliverable at an economic cost.

Of course that link i posted will take you to whatever is currently page 10 of the list of most recent trades and the 71k trade will doubtless be much further down the list by now.

The trades all show on the London stock exchange site, including the one for 71k at 09.28 https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/AFC/afc-energy-plc/trade-recap?page=10

At the last Annual Report, dated 30th April 2020, Linde had a 20.1% stake, JCB Research 9.3% and Allianz Global 5.0%. No updates on that have been reported as far as I can see.

Remember also, that most of the detail on joint working with Linde might be through the jointly-owned subsidiary company ITM Linde Engineering Gmbh (each party owning a 50% stake).

...and at present surely we are all traders - ie we bought the shares on the hope of selling at a higher price at some point in the future? The alternative would be that we have bought on basis of potential dividends that might start to flow at some future date and I suspect that there are very few who have approached it on that basis.

I hope you are correct, but I suspect the price needs to challenge 40p a number of times before it breaks through. It's quite a significant mental threshold and a lot of folks might have profit-taking in mind at that figure. Several people on here have mentioned sales at that level and there will be automatic sell orders in the system that will need shaking out before the price can progress. ...unless, of course, there are now institutional buyers who are keen to get on board and able to quickly mop up the small-scale individual sales as they come through.

#201 here!