Member Info for MaccGaz

Thanks for contacting him and posting the details.

I wasn't impressed with his response to the quarterly updates. You can't have quarterly updates every 6 months!

I feel that a big part of the share price problem is that there is no stream of news. We're unlikely to get much until September and investors will be looking for something more interesting to put their money into. If things were going well and we were posting that progress every 3 months I'm sure it would help maintain the interest and build momentum.

The "quarterly" updates that are produced every 6 months are usually very vague and careful not to get anyone excited or upset.

I think he's made it clear that he's just going to focus on the business and he's not interested in doing anything that might be able to help with the share price. If it goes up, great... if it goes down, oh well.

Looks like it's a pre-agreed changing of hands, otherwise we'd have dropped considerably.

So, the questions are who bailed and why and who bought in and why?

Perhaps it's a potential acquirer starting off on the cheap. Better put my rose tinted glasses away before they get dirty!

I think we're at a point of good value now. The income is pretty stable, with a low reliance on their ability to sell and hopefully it'll make the finances a bit clearer. Costs still seem a bit high, but we're making profits and I'm sure that dividends are coming when the pandemic dies down a bit.

We've had things every year which makes it difficult to compare results, like the income from gTLD auctions, write-offs, acquisitions, etc. There are still some things that can muddy the water in the background, but to a much lower extent. I think the AdultBlock stuff might be significant this year, but reduce in the future.

Hopefully, we'll just get the sale of the company soon as that's what many independent investors are looking for now. It'd be a good time to buy to get the benefit of the AdultBlock income.

Bakky's link works if you just copy and paste it into a new browser.

The government should have closed the stock markets to prevent the great on-going losses and profiteering by shorters. In our case, there was less than £50k traded (at least as reported) and I can imagine the one buy in the afternoon had a pick a sellers and a race to the bottom.

I guess lots of people are all just selling everything, they just have to be careful not to sell at the bottom. The FTSE 100 is down ~30% but you can be sure it'll go straight back up when it's all over... As for here... who knows, but it is an excellent opportunity for the business to do the buyback at a great price.

Well, it's good that you (and subsequently 'we') have had some clarification on some of the subjects and it shows good character to admit and any mistakes.

I do agree with some other recent posts that the company RNS' almost always add something to confuse or muddy the waters. I think the company has always had the issue that investors don't understand the technical aspects of the business, but I'd hoped that the end of the debts and bad contracts would make it at least appear that the numbers are simple... but that still doesn't seem to be the case.

This should have been the turning point, with no more auctions(?), all the debt cleared, costs under control, no more integrating other businesses, stable (and growing) renewal revenue, etc. It should be simple profit... hopefully the audited accounts in March will clear a lot up and offer some future expectations.

It's been a very long wait to make some money out of this company!

$4.6m increase in cash (excluding one-offs), after paying off $10m worth of exceptional loans/bad contracts... sounds pretty good to me!

An initial $1.5m dividend would be a good start and a gesture to the future, but with those kinds of profits I can only see that value increasing.

Most importantly (for me), we ripe for a takeover now. There's clearly a few bad Chinese debtors, but the reduced cost of the London contract show that's already built in. For someone in the industry with the existing infrastructure they'd be able to take even higher profits by reducing the duplicated costs.

Nice - all bases covered!

I hope it is a big success!

Of course, I agree that we don't want young kids stumbling across porn, but the government's responsibility is secondary - It is the parent's responsibility. The government should just be providing the information to help the parents do their job.

There are tools on all devices to prevent the content being shown - better than any age verification tool (but certainly not perfect) and you can even ask your ISP to block it at that level. If you have young children in your home then just take a small amount of your time to go and learn how to block this content from them. The majority of homes do not have children in them and they certainly don't have young children, so why force all adults to go through this process?

When children become teenagers they will search out the content. Only the big sites, which show legal content, will use the age verification and it will ultimately lead to teenagers:
1) Viewing content on other sites that are not legally required to get verification
2) Teaching an entire generation about VPN's and why every household should have one - which the government definitely doesn't want
3) Worst of all, they search and go down the rabbit hole of dodgy sites until they get viruses, illegal content and who knows what other possibilities, grooming, blackmail, etc.

I also think that the age verification tools will very quickly be cracked or credentials shared should a great demand appear for that and, if you're not logging access, then how can you stop them? If you are logging them, then you're a data risk.

I also fear for how far they might let it go. The two most annoying/frustrating parts of the internet are the sheer number of ads that are shown, severely degrading performance/the experience and pop-ups that get in the way. Yet, the EU government basically enforced every single website in the EU to have a pop-up telling you about cookies when you visit it!! People that don't understand the internet shouldn't be making decisions on it.

Imagine browsing the internet and having to authenticate again and again through different age verification providers as you browse your favourite "discovery" site, like facebook, reddit or even the likes of the bbc. Any video that's 18+ being required to verify your age. It's already there on some video sites... you won't believe the number of people that were born on January 1st 19XX! :)

I think that there is a place for age verification and twitter/Facebook are good examples. However, I believe that enforcing it on porn sites will lead to greater problems. A better solution is for parents to learn to block at the household level and for schools to educate the children on this and the many other modern online issues.

I do wish you luck with your business SJL and my comments are not going to affect anything, I just think it was a bad idea from the start... and the government has treated your company badly because of the initial decision.

That's all I have to say on this

I think there is definitely some scope in getting compensation considering that they said what they were looking to implement and then asking other companies to actually do the work... then changed their minds.

However, in my opinion, I do think they were right to change their minds as it was a bad decision in the first place.

There are some freemium domains, but the constant growth tells us that they're either renewing them at a higher fee or just buying alternatives for whatever scheme they're using them for. The real danger with freemiums is that they buy them in huge chunks and don't renew, leaving us with declining domain sales. Whilst I've been disappointed overall by the progress MMX has made over since the initial .London announcement, this years growth in domains has been surprisingly good.

For my figures, I used ntldStats for the group: 1st Jan 2019 - 1.7m to 1st Jan 2020 2.45m

So, a 750k growth, which is 44% of 1.7m.

https://ntldstats.com/registry/group/Minds-Machines-Group-Limited

I know it doesn't include everything, but it's the best easy representation that we can get.

It has been a long time, although I stopped buying more a long time ago too. I've been holding out for a takeover, but it's never arrived.

Having said that, next year (Rodney), we should be in the best position for takeover. The onerous contract settlement, which it looks like it costs us around $2.5m / year (!), will be gone... adding significantly to future profits. Domains are up 45% (Excluding ICM domains) from last year, with high renewal rates.

We're set for a profitable future, the question will be by how much and what will they do with that money?

We're an ideal purchase for another company in the same industry as the cost base can be absorbed into existing infrastructure with even more profits to be made.

The content of the end of year RNS and any forward looking guidance could make a huge difference to the share price, so I hope they consider it all very carefully.

I don't think that anything useful to investors has occurred at an MMX AGM yet! Although, I would expect that they will invite people to talk about the latest results. We're a publicly trading company that should have made a profit so I'm hoping they invite lots of people who can spread the word.

I've not been that hopeful on the AdultBlock at this point as I seem to remember that the 10 year expiration of the ICM AdultBlock didn't expire until December at the earliest (Perhaps SJL will remember). I'm not sure I would ever renew early on something like that unless there was a significant discount.

Hopefully the .London business will be sorted and there's not much else in terms of new gTLDs to influence the future so I think we're now at a point where we just need to grow, acquire someone else (please, no!) or be acquired (finally!). However, the current share price isn't good and being low-balled would not be appreciated.

In terms of growth, ntldstats says we had ~1.7m in Dec 2018 and now we're at ~2.4m, so that's good going. Last year the trading update was at the end of January and should be again. A healthy profit and dividend announcement might be enough to boost that share price... then let's try to get the business sold.

We look to be 40% up on domains from this time last year (excluding the ICM domains), which is a significant increase. The last few months has definitely showed good progress in that area.

I think we'll be in a better position to sell if there's no .London eating a big chunk of revenues, so I'd prefer to get rid now - and they were only waiting for the legal side to be completed.

I'm not sure what will happen from an accounting point of view, with the "onerous contract provision" already shown on the balance sheet as a large loss, with the cash coming out to pay it.

Yeah, I do feel for SJL as I imagine he has invested a lot of both time and money into the venture and the big opportunity is now gone. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50073102

Perhaps some of the technology can still be used for other purposes though.

As for the porn block itself, I thought it was an awful idea. To think in a day and age where such a fuss is made of internet cookies, that we might actually ask people to identify themselves (to someone at least) whilst watching porn. Crazy!

They came to their senses as it was obvious it would push people into using things like VPNs, they'd wander off the beaten path to who knows what and hackers/scammers may have a new gold mine to dig from. Possibly making a VPN more and more a household subscription - which is not going to do copyright holders any good and will make any kind of control for governments more difficult.

Ultimately, keeping kids away from porn should just be the job of the parent.

Progress on sales has been good for the last 6 weeks. We're up 7 or 8% in that time.

The buy back seems to be having an effect now that the free sales are drying up. Up 11% there too and hopefully it should begin to accelerate now.

The buyback is starting to have an effect on the share price now. Keep these 200-400k buys coming please!

On a separate note, do Tap & Sunday just not like Thread view on these forums? The restarting of threads in the old view does jumble up the forum a bit.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/903542/minds--machines-group--now-generating-real-cash--as-business-momentum-continues-903542.html

You're welcome :P

I see your point, I just see the lack of any buys/sells as the most glaring thing. Surely, £1m worth of buys in small stacks should force the MM to raise the price to find more shares? £1m all in one go would probably have them ringing up SJL again!

It doesn't matter what they're listed as. That's LSE saying whether it looks like a sell or a buy, based on whether it is closer to the bid or ask.

These small buys are what I want them to do, but every day. Create the demand that forces the share price up.