Member Info for Sangijuelas1

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.

Fund managers have to report the detailed costs of their fees charged to clients and there is great pressure to keep these low.

Investment Trusts are getting treated under the FCA rules as if they were unit trusts charging fees rather than listed plcs whose fees are reported and dealt with as they would be by any other public company.

This probably explains why Border Pensions were selling recently.

Some info here on part of the problem why fund managers aren't buying.

https://pensionsandsavings.com/time-for-ministers-to-intervene-on-investment-trusts-as-fca-has-failed-to-achieve-change/

The only sensible paper for market news remains the FT.

Telegraph will get even worse if Paul Marshall gets control of it.

He used his ownership of GB News to attack NatWest over Farage's "debanking" while his other firm Marshall Wace has a large short position against the bank.

This was apparently completely normal

Investments over the last 18 months are also likely to have been done at reduced valuations so will have picked up some bargains along the way.

Https://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ipo-key-things-know-090000743.html

Where the portfolio has frothy valuations there are others like Iceye that haven't been adjusted up as no recent funding rounds.

The Reddit IPO is priced at 6.5bn.

Anyway Revolut is more like Stripe and neither are in a rush to IPO at a reduced valuation.

If the market is the world's best fundamental analyst why are so many UK companies getting swooped up at large premiums to their SPs?

The value they were holding Perkbox at sounded fairly accurate.

The Telegraph article about Triple Point referenced Molten's discount as 54% last year.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/03/08/revolut-investor-slashes-fintech-valuation-5bn/#:~:text=US%20tech%20investor%20TriplePoint%20Venture,%2433bn%20at%20its%20peak.

That is actually an error as MV cut it by 40%, not 54%. But saying that they never valued it internally at 33bn as they thought it was way too frothy.

I think when Revolut raised at 33bn MV actually realised part of their Revolut investment. I saw it on a presentation slide listing successful exits.

And they have recently bought some back as it's one of the holdings in the Seedcamp fund they recently bought.

Revolut is held by Molten at a value based on market cap of about 16bn dollars.

The US VC Triple Point dropped it down on their books last week from 28bn to 23bn.

So MV is showing signs of prudent valuations.

Apologies Senator you are right.

I think I had in mind they had knocked it down again by about £10m

Graphcore is already written down to £10m, which is unlikely to present a problem.

The shareholders of Forward I mean