Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Chutz,
Think you should stop while you are ahead.
All earning are subject to tax. If you rent your house it is subject to tax as well as your salary.
Bonuses are subject to tax, even your company car is subject to tax considerations and it is not part of your salary.
Please check your tax liability:
"....... Any money that you receive from your investments will be added to all your other types of income, including wages, personal pensions and rental income. Depending on all your earnings, you will then be taxed at the bracket that is applicable to you ....."
About the only thing where you will get money and it does not involve tax consideration is winning the lottery.
As for whether I am willing to give him 60% of what he makes me . That is a totally different issue, what we are looking at is good corporate governance and that is not dependent on what I would like to give him because he is a good guy on not.
Chutz,
If the shares are part of his salary, why put a target performance against it. If PM is not responsible for share price performance why link his shares to share price performance. [ I do have share options based on performance but these are based on performance and have lost out some years due to performance not meeting target. Due to economic downturn, covid or whatever that is irrelevant, I missed the exercise target. Similarly our workers do have bonuses but again dependent on target profit....miss and they lose out]
You are saying that the board is not stupid, but I can't think of a more stupid thing than for them to say shares will be awarded based on a target performance if the target performance is irrelevant to the award of the shares.
By your own statement you just made the board to be fairly stupid. A can't be a function of B, if B does not impact on the outcome of A.
Just to be clear, I am not having a go at PM. This is not his fault, he is not exactly going to say No if they offer this to him, none of us will.
This is just an issue with the make up of our independent directors and remuneration committee. We have a very weak board and there seems to be a lack of oversight. If we are trying to be taken as a big company, then we should strive to have processes and procedures of big companies. We should try to emulate the standard of business conduct of big players.
Maybe another thing that needs to be on Paul's list of business direction development will be to try and improve our business governance.
Esco,
We needed to keep him that we went against the ethical rule of any well managed company.
He is a CEO for crying out aloud and not a design engineer or software engineer! A CEO's role is to provide strategic direction and they come at 10 a penny. The techie folks who do the work are harder to find. I work with in a top 4 IT company in the world and we change CEO almost every 2-3 years.
If we needed a CEO that we have to bend good business practice to keep him, then we are in much more trouble than I thought. Without wishing him ill, but just for illustration, if for some reason anything happened to our CEO tomorrow...you view is that SEE will go under? My hope is that we have at least our 3 years rolling strategic direction mapped out at every point time. The only thing a new CEO needs to do is choose to maintain current strategic direction or have his own vision and change the companies strategic direction.
CEO only provides direction, you may find that negotiations, and I have been in a few, in a big company is normally not led by the CEO, he may be present and he definitely will be the one to sign it off. [With staff of over 450 I will class SEE as a Medium size enterprise]
I am pretty sure the vesting price will be lower as it is usually calculated based on the share price at the time of grant.
Hence the vesting price for the shares that he has failed to meet target will probably now be lower.
There is a reason why this RNS was released on Friday , ( bad news day for news releases), this stinks of "mates rate".
The point of incentivisation is to give key staff a target to aim for in order to get that pot of gold which they stand to lose if they did not make that target.
With this practice, the management's interest is no longer aligned with the interest of the private investor, as they could just kick the can down the road ad nauseam.
You have to see the funny side though:
At least they are consistent, it is not just the timeline for project delivery that they stretch and kick down the road, they also kick the timeline for option investments.
That is rich. I thought incentivisation is to make the management strive to meet the target set in order t take advantage and if they did not meet the target the lose the option. A carrot and stick strategy .....meet expectations and you get a shed load of shares for next to nothing but if you do not meet expectation you lose the right.
What is the point if we just kick the can further than the road if you did not meet the expectation for vesting?
I do not mind giving him new options to incentivise him to do something with the share price, but the options that have lapsed because he did not meet expectations should have been lost and not extended. If he gest to 2026 and he still did not meet expectations then, by this practice, we will just give him new options and extend the lives of the old ones that he did not meet target for vesting?
What is the point if the practive is
A synic might think that we throw out a story of how Gen 3 will conquer the world in the future and will be ordered in 100K batches the same date that SEYE is announcing a real contract for aftermarkets. And not with any Joe Blogg down the road but with Linde, a +33Billion turn over company. Maybe somehow Linde did not get the memo.
You can tell I am raging because unlike most here I believe that the money is in after market and not Cars, DMS plus the ongoing service contract. At about $10 a pop you need an awful lot of cars each year to make any money.
While we are still procrastinating SEYE has signed contract with an OEM for their AIS fitment at point of manufacture, and the chorus from us was that we were not interested in OEM fitments but aftermarket. Now they have managed to snag a large corporation in aftermarket with their mickey mouse effort while our super-duper alternative still haven't seen the light of day.
I said it before and with risk of repeating myself I will say it again, competitors are not just going to hang around and wait for us to be ready. While we are faffing around they are slowing taking a bite at our lunch.
Thanks Lewbo,
I was wondering who provided the DMS. IF Cipia DMS does not cut it then they have to look at SEE or some other provider other than Cipia.
I am not sure about the statement that SEE has been underplaying their hand. If they had been doing that then they would have been delivering above market expectations.
The reality is that they had performed below what they have stated. In fact if you want to be brutal then they have not even delivered based on the guidance they gave the market. Why they have not done that is another story but for the market that is just excuses why we have not met expectations or guidance.
We promised Gen 3 aftermarket a while ago, we missed and the deployment delayed ...reason why we are late is just excuse to the market....every company will give you what they consider to be a valid reason why they missed expectation guideline. Market is however looking for predictability ... What we say we do at the time we said that we will do it.
PM provided guidance that we would have RFQ closed by now, in fact in his presentation he alluded that for the OEM's the time is already late. None of these RFQ has been closed out......there may be valid reasons out with control of SEE, but again the market does not deal on excuses.
I could go on ... the long and short of it is that SEE as a company have developed a track record of missing its own timeline. If PM comes out now and said that multi million contract will be signed tomorrow, apart from us speculators who may dive in immediately...the serious money will wait to actually see if a contract is signed before coming in. They are willing to pay a few pence higher but a surety that we can deliver on our words.
With our track record of meeting our own timelines, we may be late for our own funeral.
Again the reason for missing may well be due o the person down the road and not SEE, but the outcome is the same, we missed on our own timeline. Every other thing is just explanation/excuses on why we missed the target.
Buckle in and batten down the hatch, as by mid 2024, hopefully the performance will start to speak for itself.
What we need is closed RFQ's , things that will drop to the bottom line. Licencing agreements and collaborations will not due it.
Collaborations is jut that; it does not say that whatever is the product of the collaboration will be wanted by the end-customer and at what quantum.
Closed out RFQ and step increase in aftermarket connected number are things that factually will affect the TO and hence eventual profit.
SEE has promised so much for so long that the market is no longer interested in promises but is in a Show me The Money mode. We have talked the talk for long enough now Mr Market just wants us to walk the walk...else the price will just continue to drift.
Seize,
You can have a patent for invention but for a location. Our design is patented but that does not mean they can't have a different design for resolving the same problem in a rear view mirror.
I am more surprised at how quickly they resolved the problem of heating in a confined space as well as the fact that a mirror moves depending on who is driving . PM thought it may take then a year to 2 years to solve that problem, so we thought we have about two years head start before we can have competition offering in the rear view mirror.
Still if our algorithm is better then being able to see then driver and occupant is one element, the algorithm still needs to be able to determine attention state as well other functionalities. [ Mind I say if our algorithm is better as I don't have access to both so can't say for definite].
Irrespective, if DMS/OMS takes off the there will be plenty for everyone, although I was hoping that Magna would have cornered the market before others solve the technical issues with having the camera in a rear view mirror.
I am however surprised that CIPIA have also tapped out a rear view mirror solution so fast. I thought that PM said that we may have about a year lead before others solve the technical issue of incorporating into a rear view mirror.
I knew that competitors will obviously be trying to develop their own offering but believed that they are further behind than these News releases are suggesting.
I thought we are currently the only company with a working mirror based DMS/OMS?
Either we have miscalculated or they are talking bulls in their video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSiaz6E-Zn4
Lewbo
I am not sure if you have been in software development space, but before you you loose objectivity and view everything with SEE tinted glasses, maybe you should actually check DEVANT to see what they do as well as read their own news release.
I have read the white paper and that did not say to me that you can not generate synthetic data that is capable of training an AI. The key angle of Devant is that they will take away most of the pain of having to painfully collect naturalistic data expecially as it is almost impossible to collect this in the corner cases.
Having seen what they actually do, you may also pay key attention to this statement in their News release:
"....Offering unparalleled data configurability, Devant delivers lifelike 3D simulations that can enable Seeing Machines and other machine learning developers to reliably generate any real-life scenario. .." without SEE tinted glasses you may note that they offer the same capability to other machine learning companies.
The upshot is that we can now accurately generate synthetic data that can be used to train AI. That is what may affect advantage position. The rest is incidental and as comes as a by product of the fact that synthetic data can be trusted.
We all want SEE to be £1 yesterday , but objectivity helps especially in managing expectations.
Anyway it is your money and you are free to read it and believe that it means that SEE has just cornered the market in the use of synthetic data.
Would have preferred if they had bought the company outright, but I suppose Devant know what they have and so not willing to sell or go into exclusive arrangement.
My main worry is that if synthetic data generation is accurate enough to train the AI, then our key advantage of having xx billions of naturalistic data would soon be negated.
SEE really needs to start taking advantage of their first mover position. Others are not just going to sit back and watch SEE dawdle along. There is a race to catch and overtake the leader just as in any other business. Technological advances lije this ability to generaye accurate synthetic data will also make what we thought as insurmountable advantage next to worthless.
We need to be doing more and not waiting for others to catch up. I am still disappointed that after almost 10 years of being the only player in the aftermarket we are still talking about only 50,000 installs.
Get the contracts and RFQs in the bag to at least lock in OEMs...then it will need a bigger effort for them to change DMS supplier in the future.
This is a different company to the start-up of a few years ago. That was with an Optics start- up and not an AI company. Also that was a perpetual exclusive license in all Car and Aviation space. AVANT is an AI company and also do sell their capability to other companies in the DMS and OMS space.