Adam Davidson, CEO of Trident Royalties, discusses offtake milestones and catalysts to boost FY24. Watch the video here.
I think we all need to take whatever is said in the papers with a pinch of salt.
You can rwally only trust the FT for these kinds of things as they tend to dual source before publishing, but tjis is them quoting a building magazine interview and a source in government. We don't know what source and if you look at how wrong the newspapers got the musical chairs last week you'll know their sources need a degree of skepticism.
If you can do it why would you bring in the Chinese? It puts you in the league table for civil engineering capability with Africa - where China pretty much own the place! If you are marketing an outward looking capable Britain you do your own infrastructure.
This is funny. So could CRCC do it? Yes. Would it be cheaper and faster? Probably cheaper (they would need to use local labour) but not as fast as they think due to planning, public consultation, compulsory purchase, heritage assets and archaelogical digs. Crossrail was full of the latter.
People will say but they can build a hospital in 10 days, it depends what you class as a hospital!
Then there is the political fallout. Boris is Brexit personified, and both his tory mates and the country will be shown that Britain isnt just a mid league player but a low league player and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we cant build our own infrastructure! Politically I can't see it happening.
Someone on the thread said what about Huawei? Totally diiferent scenario - we don't have a company that makes british 5G equipment and really that boils down to who do you want listening to your conversations? America or China - see Cisco then CEO from 2010's blasting NSA for taking their goods in transit to companies and then installing dodgy firmware so the NSA had a backdoor! The govt would know this and will be using VPN tunnelling sw to counteract it so the GCHQ guys would have advised America's claims as being total BS
All in all its a load if rubbish just like the claims Kier's debt was being sold off on the cheap by banks 4 months ago.
That said undoubtedly the share price will fall Monday . Sadly as I'm long!
which, for clarity, comes back to my point that I don't believe the board have to say "We have a deal at price X with company Y" until it's completed. Again I come back to the point that Kier Living has, in company communication, been said to have a sale progressing, and I don't think they'd be allowed to say that if there was no bid.
Nope, I'm just explaining shareholders, when the company is in debt, aren't needed to approve a sale and neither would there need to be information on the transaction until the sale cannot be retracted. This is different to where a company isn't in debt, so the banks don't have first charge, so a sale, or purchase if significant to the ongoings of the business (or the company needs to loan money/spin shares to purchase the asset) would need to ask for shareholder approval. In these cases a memorandum of understanding between companies is signed pending shareholder approval which will list the price paid and for what.
I think given Kier's market cap is circa 140M to 160M depending on the day, and Kier Living at a guess is somewhere between 50M and 150M you could feel that shareholders need to agree on a sale, and thus it's advertised prior to completion. However, in Kier's case they have a lot of debt and banks will have power over ordinary shareholders (that is to say banks get anything before shareholders) and thus the Kier Living sale is being used to service the debt. That means the board can sell without shareholder approval because it's for the survival of the company (bacause the banks have first dibs)
I'm trying to think of another example of a company in the same boat, and the closest I can come up with was Barclays selling to a Qatari wealth group to get a cash injection to avoid going to the Government. That turned out to be $11Bn with questionable advisory payments and interest payments (which Qatar sold on and doubled their money in 2 years). It was all done without the shareholders approval and very fast if you remember. It was their way of avoiding a Govt bailout which poisoned RBS for years (decade?).
Not sure it can be said there is "No Buyer" for Kier Living. The management team are still talking about it, and the argument put forward for it is if there was buyer they'd have to say something in statement by now as a PLC. Surely if that was the case they'd also, and they've been given ample opportunity since September 19, they'd have to say something like "No Buyer found" if the converse was true?
I've been involved with two buy outs before and if its final bid related you don't say anything until all T's&C's signed. The reason is due to final bid pricing. Typically the bids on the board are quite variable - it can be 5% to 10% variance which is millions of dollars/pounds so everybody is quiet until the deal is done and no pullout can occur. This is quite typical too, as the value of a division to different companies is incredibly varied. For example just gaining market share may be a reason for one company, whereas another may find the new company complements their vertical markets well and they can achieve synergies. For these reasons you don't really talk about it until the deal is fully baked!
That said.... depending on how tight both ships will then attenuate how big the rumour mill is. Depending on the professionalism of the board(s) would then depend on how mouthy a certain insider is. I have no judgement on how tightly lipped Kier is. I am guessing it was pretty good back in the day otherwise who'd have bought into their capital raising debacle? The management has changed considerably since then so that is an open question.
Personally I think the fact they say a deal is progressing publicly on record means something is happening. They'd be in trouble is it was any other way.