Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Don't know what you are talking about. I was replying to VP
You can have low costs but if you don't deliver on sales because no one knows who you are then you are going to fail.
The point is that the original article called them fulfilment centres when they weren't. They were just sites offloading made up orders from large lorries and on loading to delivery vans.
Seems that it was Kroger's mistake in thinking they could sell online in states where they had no store presence and limited brand awareness
Value play- the other day you were going on about an article saying that 3 Kroger spoke fulfilment centres were closing.
Kroger has no store presence in Florida and Texas and thought they could be successful with online only sales there.
The spokes were simply locations where orders already made up at CFCs were transferred from lorries to delivery vans.
So I think you were over egging something that is unlikely to involve much Ocado revenue opportunities at the spoke location.
If you are looking for something insightful or informative on these boards, you are in the wrong place,!
It's aggressive for a low volume share. Other sellers were a bit more sensitive.
They went under 3% so don't need to report further sales. They sold down very aggressively to get down below 3%.
AVI built up a position when the SP dipped below 200. It felt like a show of confidence at the time.
They are all out confirmed by a recent RNS
Bear markets can last a lot longer than 18-24 months.
Remember the Lost Decade? Or speak to some that invested in Japan 20 odd years ago.
Peel Hunt were suggesting today in the FT that the UK market is going to end up like a stagnant backwater akin to Ireland's.
I would like to take on more risk with US stocks but they are facing a lot of political risk.
If Trump gets in he is talking about shutting down Federal agencies like the SEC, which I don't think the market would like.
Also a massive chunk of the SMT private holdings are in SpaceX, Bytedance, Northvolt and Stripe.
These are massive profitable companies and their value is not really in question.
So comparing the discounts doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Besides no one is going to make an offer to buy SMT, whereas someone could decide they want to buy the MV assets.
AVI bought in when the price was at all time lows. They may have been aggrieved by the dilution from the raise. Either way they exited with a profit.
Liontrust recently bought a lot and BlackRock were happy to pay 280p.
Do you think BlackRock didn't do any due diligence?
The Perkbox valuation seems to have been pretty accurate as the sale was slightly above what it was held at
It certainly wasn't sold for a third of that value, which is what the SP valued it at.
As for the valuations the lenders and auditors have all had a look, especially since the Forward deal.
The lenders can evaluate quarterly.
If there are companies like Ledger that raised at same valuation as previously and others like Isar that did so at higher valuations then that can be taken as an indicator as well.
As for returning cash I believe it would be irresponsible to do so without looking also to scale back debt.
I am talking more about introducing dividends or buy backs as an option rather than point blank refusing.
They got a recent unexpected sale of Perkbox. Probably about £20m.
Stick it in a pot. Wait for another decent trade sale. For example, M-Files, which is profitable on 100m plus revenue. Maybe a few million from Graphcore. And then sell down some Revolut on the secondary. There were buyers recently for Stripe employee shares so there would be plenty of buyers for Revolut.
As I said activist investors and hedge funds are starting to sniff around holdings in unlisted companies.
The board need to get a bit more realistic rather than threatening to delist (as per annual report) if an activist fund gets involved.
Senator - you remind me very much of a frequent poster Sage on this board.
You make some good points but it is difficult to address them as a lot of things are jumbled together in one impenetrable paragraph.
Regarding Aiven. Their last accounts showed 67m Euro revenue. This was double the previous year. It also occurred when there was a significant downturn in the cloud market, which has since relaxed.
The market is valuing the MV holding at a very approximate 28m dollars. MV wrote down their holding from the 3bn valuation from £105m to £85m. So they have it valued at about 2.4bn. But divide that by the MV discount and it's seen to be worth about 800m.
Aiven has a close comparable listed stock in Confluent. Current sales to price ratio of 13.
If we conservatively assume latest year revenue of 100m then a valuation of 1.3bn would be fair.
If they have had a better year then this would of course be higher.
Rapid revenue increases are quite possible as UI Path doubled and even tripled revenue when it was taking off.
The point is that the current SP is reflecting a further discount.
I had big doubts about the Aiven valuation but I have started to get a better feeling about it.
Confluent say the Team is about 60bn dollars and growing at about 10% a year.
I am less sure about Thought Machine although there is talk of them looking to IPO and I doubt that would be likely if they were doing worse than previous years.
I think a lot more pressure needs to be put on the board to return capital to shareholders.
The portfolio is now incredibly bloated and yet they continue to make new investments and refuse to consider anything like buybacks or special dividends.
As an example, Chrysalis are saying that if there is a successful IPO of Klarna, they will use the cash to pay a dividend.
I think there needs to be much more focus on paying down the debt and getting into a position to reward shareholders for their patience.
We need an activist investor to get on board as at present the board are like kids camping out in a candy store.
If they really think their Revolut holding is worth £75m then get selling it on the secondary VC market. They have previously said this could be possible if they were at risk of breaching debt covenants.
Shareholders should have got a payday from the UI Path IPO, which was a massive return. Instead the funds were invested at the peak of the bubble and basically burnt so that MV were left having to raise capital with significant dilution.
Delisting would be worse as any shares held in an ISA would have to go in a General Investment Account.
And if they opted to wind down would take years to get money back.
Graphcore was one of the biggest components of the portfolio about 4-5 years ago.
By valuation it is currently 15th.
FT reporting today that some renewable energy trusts having to consider delisting and winding down.
They are unwilling to raise capital as don't want to dilute existing investors.
May lead to additional interest in the sector from Special Situations funds or hedge funds. Elliott have just taken a stake in Scottish Mortgage IT.
Still main risk for me here is the delisting possibility.
More here
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/ideas/2023/12/20/there-is-a-golden-opportunity-to-fix-investment-trust-discounts/
They are trying to get stuff resolved in Parliament about it.