What has it got going for it ?13 May 2017 13:11
I honestly don't believe there are people who believe this has an actual chance of making any decent money. It's a good rampers share and that's it. This is an old post but still very relevant.
If you look at the AIM market it is full of companies that have been promising the earth for years, but have yet to actually achieve much of any real substance.
One such company which would definitely appear to fall into that bracket is Provexis (PXS), which for almost as long as I can remember has been banging on about its patented Fruitflow tomato extract, which has been proven to help prevent heart attacks, strokes and venous thrombosis, via platelet inhibitors which the product contains.
At a time when so many people are more conscious about their health than ever before and regularly take supplements to improve it, it sounds like the company could well be onto something interesting and which the consumer might demand.
But then we take a look at Fruitflow itself and its history, which dates right back to 2009 when the European Commission authorised the health claim that it ‘helps maintain normal platelet aggregation, which contributes to healthy blood flow’.
Then in mid-2010 Provexis announced it had entered into an agreement with DSM Nutritional Products, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of vitamins and similar, to bring Fruitflow to market.
That agreement was subsequently revised in June 2015, making it more favourable for Provexis in terms of costs and fixed overheads relating to the product. At the time the company mentions that under the new terms it would have been 101% better off in terms of profit from sales for the previous three years. 101% of near to zero is still next to nothing.
What it isn’t so quick to quantify though is what that would have represented in terms of actual ‘profit’, because the reality is that all it would have done is slightly reduce the level of losses being made during that period.
This has been a common theme for the company, and although it is quick to mention that profit from the agreement with DSM amounted to revenue of just £92,000 for the six months ended March 31 2016.
That resulted in an underlying loss from operations of £385,000, with over £350,000 of that being due to admin expenses, and Provexis made a net loss of some £440,000 for the period.
My big concern here would be that given the product has been around for more than seven years now, and has had a tie up with DSM for more than six years, then surely it would have achieved far more with it already than it has done, if the product was ever really going to take off in the way the company hoped when it came up with the idea.
Provexis did launch a new Fruitflow and Omega-3 dietary supplement back in June, and it still remains to be seen how that translates into financial results, but I would be surprised if it changed overall profitability enough to really make the