Member Info for peka

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/news

My invitation said 1 pm GMT, not BST.

Did anyone else get caught out by the fact that the invitation to this meeting was for 1 pm GMT, i.e. 2pm BST? Incompetence if they can't even get the time right in their messages!

I received the same email from Mandy today and sent her this reply:

"My Novacyt holding is in an ISA with Interactive Investor. What evidence of this holding do you need?"

She replied immediately with:

"If you could send me a screen shot from the Interactive Investor portal showing the number of shares you hold that would be perfect, together with a completed voting form if possible."

So if your holding is with a nominee company, it seems all you need to do is to send Mandy a screen shot from the nominee's portal showing the number of shares you hold.

Hillseeker, thank you very much for your excellent posts about Novacyt satisfying so many of Jim Slater's criteria for the Zulu Principle.

There's a video interview with a fund manager called Richard Leonard here, in which he discusses his holding of Novacyt at 18:25 minutes after the start:

https://www.piworld.co.uk/education-videos/a-piworld-interview-richard-leonard-what-hes-been-buying-july-2021/?ct=t(RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN)

Sam16 wrote: "DHSC dispute is on a product supplied in the first contract and NCYT has taken a product warranty provision of nearly £20 million in the 2020 accounts as they believe that in the worse case, the company will provide replacement products with sales value of around £100 million, 80% Gross margin, with raw material cost of £20 million which is the warranty provision. If DHSC were to accept replacement product, then the case is settled and all delayed receivables should be paid to NCYT."

I expect the UK government will be keen to have Novacyt's new saliva LFT, which at present is a unique offering, so perhaps that might be a suitable 'replacement product' to resolve the DHSC dispute.

Hi Porky, you wrote in reference to my post about ShaunP:
"FAO Peka,
We all read it, we don't need reminding of his parting gift."
The problem is I had not read it on this board, but I did get an email from ShaunP and I assume many other people have as well. I don't agree with the main point he made, but I wanted to get other people's views on it. My previous post seems to have been removed. Are the thought police now active on this board?

The Times, Torygraph and Grauniad have published articles about the FDA's recent statement on the Innova lateral flow tests:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/us-raises-alarm-over-innova-medical-group-covid-test-kits-used-in-britain-fqvqwpcwz

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/06/11/blow-test-trace-scheme-asus-watchdog-queries-rapid-covid-tests/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/11/us-health-agency-gives-innova-lateral-flow-covid-tests-scathing-review

https://twitter.com/TaylorQuant/status/1397470412095819776

Perhaps these tests are of an older type that are less in demand now that Novacyt has developed more recent tests such as Promate, and perhaps Novacyt has a lot of these tests in stock and they have a limited shelf life. So donating them to charity is the best solution as the tests won't be wasted and it is excellent public relations.

MrAdventurous wrote "Oxford Nanopore not listed itself but IP Group (IPO), hold a 15% stake."

That's true. IP Group's share price has doubled over the last year, partly because of speculation that Oxford Nanopore will have a valuation in the billions if and when it lists.

Can anyone explain the valuation discrepancy between the market capitalisation of Novacyt and the prospective valuation of Oxford Nanopore? This is what an Investors Chronicle wrote about Oxford Nanopore on 14 April 2021:

"Swiss giant Roche (SWX:RO) and New-York-quoted Abbott Laboratories (US:ABT) sit among the international cohort of ‘mega testers’ with billion-dollar market caps. Yet UK shores have also yielded a strong contingent of diagnostics companies large and small, for whom the pandemic has provided an opportunity to showcase their technologies and, in many instances, to bolster their top lines.
Oxford Nanopore is a case in point. The group secured a £113m contract last summer to supply the UK government with its ‘LamPORE’ rapid testing kit for Covid-19. Quite a sum compared with Oxford’s 2019 revenues of £52m."

The company, which was spun out of Oxford university in 2005, focuses on genomic sequencing technology. Its expertise has been used during the pandemic to track Covid-19 variants around the world.

In March, Oxford unveiled plans for a London flotation – and as Nilushi Karunaratne explored last week, it could be valued at more than £4bn by one estimate."

Bluelight wrote: "My take is dhsc didn't take all the volume they were contractually committed to, and ncyt are taking legal action to basically take or pay, but we are all unclear."

If that is the correct explanation, then Novacyt would probably have a strong case from a contractual point of view. Perhaps there is a lot of money potentially at stake in this dispute.

However, is it wise for Novacyt to refuse to make a short-term monetary concession to their biggest customer, when they are hoping to have a continuing long-term relationship with the NHS in the supply of diagnostic tools to hospitals? Furthermore the announcement of the dispute in the latest RNS has caused an immediate 40% drop in Novacyt's share price which equates to a £200 million drop in its market capitalisation. That might turn out to be a temporary drop if the share price should recover, but a lot of shareholders will have sold at the latest price because they can't cope with the volatility, in which case for them the loss in their portfolios becomes permanent. Is that worthwhile in return for, say, a once-off £20 million revenue gain should the dispute eventually be resolved in Novacyt's favour? Perhaps the company wasn't expecting such a massive reaction to the RNS, but it does make me question its CEO's judgement in this instance.

The EU has embargoed exports of AstraZeneca vaccines pending receipt of its contracted amounts and identification of a landfill site where they can safely be disposed of.

That article is as useful as reading tea leaves.

Porky, thanks for a very useful summary of yesterday's Horizon programme.
P.S. It's herd immunity, not heard immunity.

I think the differences between the French RNS and the original English RNS are unlikely to have been deliberate. I suspect that the draft RNS was revised and translated into the other language several times, the French and English versions got out of sync, and nobody noticed before they were both published. It's very easy to do when you have several people involved working in two languages.

A lot of posters on this board have been complaining recently about what they consider to be Novacyt's poor public relations. I think the reason for this is that Novacyt are currently in delicate negotiations with the UK government about an extension to Phase 1 of the contract to supply the NHS with the Q16 and Q32 machines and a possible Phase 2. When you are discussing contracts with your largest customer it is not the time to be boasting about the huge profits you are likely to make from them. All the signs are that these contracts will eventually go ahead. Shareholders need to be patient and trust Novacyt's management, who have made some spectacularly good decisions over the past year.

This is the first time I've herd of heard immunity.