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When KK was interim CEO and SEE were looking for a CEO in H1 calendar 2018, KK didn't want the permanent CEO job. He told me that the reason he didn't want it was that he did not like dealing with the City. The fund managers. The analysts. He did not enjoy that side of the role. When he eventually agreed to take the CEO role that was because Jack was appointed chairman and it was agreed that Jack would take on a lot of the City relationship work normally done by the CEO. Indeed, the appointment of Jack as Chairman and the permanent appointment of KK as CEO were announced in the same RNS.
This was not the usual company structure. As an investor, I want access to the CEO and the FD and I'm less bothered about the chairman. The CEO runs "my" company so I want to look into the whites of his eyes.
It may be that they have both quit because they have arsed up in some way. If that was the case, and there was a material change to the prospects of the company, then SEE would have been legally required to RNS that material change, which they have not. This doesn't mean there isn't bad news just that, if there was, it should have been RNSd.
It may be that the City didn't like the structure, like me, and wanted a CEO they could talk to directly and so the hoped-for sharing of work has either not fully happened or is unraveling, leading to that duo being dissolved.
It may be that Jack deciding to quit meant KK would have to take on the City relationship side of his role and he wasn't prepared to do that so he went too.
It may be that KK quit which meant the replacement CEO would be taking both KKs work and the City relationship stuff that KK should have been doing and that has meant a material change to Jack's role (and a pay cut?) so Jack went too.
We don't know. I hate it when directors leave any listed company. Investors are never given enough of a briefing on the true story and so speculation can run wild.
With £15m in the bank as at 31 Oct 2018 we have plenty of money.
Operating cash outflow in H1 was only £(4.3m) and this has been fairly typical. At 12 Jan 2019, Finncap forecast zero new shares issued between now and at least the end of FY21. Finncap have issued updates since then but, as far as I am aware, have not changed there view on cash. Finncaps main comment has been "This is good news, further de-risking the FDA clearance for Parsortix, which is expected to stimulate increased business development activities. We increase our target price"
Regarding the June 2018 fundraise, Newland, our CEO said "The additional funding will … extend the cash runway significantly past the expected timescale for FDA clearance."
I’d argue that we won't be independent enough for cash to matter. I'd expect a takeover before then. The only way I can see us issuing significant new shares is if AGL decide to float on NASDAQ at a premium to the current share price, but this would be not driven by a need for cash but driven by a desire to unlock the higher valuations that this sort of company gets on NASDAQ.
In the unlikely event that we stay independent, Newland knows he has a small company with a product that could be massive globally. He’ll not try to go it alone but will partner up with the big boys to do all the heavy lifting.
Anyway - Newland isn’t going to want dilution. Newland owns £4.9m of AGL shares plus it is only 6 months since Angle created a share scheme heavily incentivising Newland on share price performance, with the share scheme paying out nothing unless they increase the share price at least 170% and only paying out the max if they increase the share price by 440%.
Share prices do not tend to move in straight lines in either direction.
Basing that on this share price movement this morning? When a massive £70k of shares have been traded? I think you need to see a bit more volume than that to say "the market" has seen anything! Looks more like the market is fast asleep!
Yep. Much safer to invest in drug/medical companies that already have products approved and, launched into the mass market. There are some highly successful companies like that around like Glaxo, like Smith & Nephew. Unfortunately, buying those companies is very expensive, GSK market cap £76.3b, S&N £14.4b.
Exciting reality of AGL is that we get to invest in a potentially very exciting medical advance before the FDA approval, before the mass market launch, before every pension fund in the world owns a slice. AGL market cap now is only £0.1b. AGL say £1b a year market for the ovarian cancer test alone and we have other applications too, not least in breast cancer where the main FDA study is complete.
Do I expect us to be a GSK or S&N one day? No. The reality is that companies like this are normally bought out by a big boy before they can make it on their own, and that is fine by me, as long as we get a fair price and the patients get the benefit of this wonderful potential. If AGL is to be taken over, when will it happen?
With each positive research result or progresss to regulatory approval, the risk of this stuff not making it to mass market is being reduced. The big boys have to weigh up bidding earlier, and getting us cheaper or bidding later and getting more certainty and paying more... or potentially missing out because someone else buys us first. Who will squeeze the trigger first? When will that be? I'd say it is inherently impossible for us to predict when will that will be. If we could predict it then so could the big drug companies and then they could steal a march on their rivals by jumping in before them. Do I want to be invested if/when the trigger gets pulled? Hell yes.
Have a look at Angle PLC. Seriously exciting tech that could reduce cost of cancer care and help massively reduce the number of cancer deaths while also making treatment less unpleasant. The tech works but so did Beta Max so there is no certainty of riches.
:-)
Is it too early in the day for champagne?
A bit of extra analysis to do which adds a bit of extra time to FDA clearance but bureaucracy is to be expected. Also not a surprise that we smashed it on the trial itself, we know how good Parsortix is, but excellent to see it proving itself in the FDA trial and that should encourage interest in what is going on at Angle. To mix some metaphors, we are really knocking on the door now and I'm glad I'm already on board and not going to miss this boat.
Pop
Smart Eye win with Renault Nissan would appear to be good news for hopes of a duopoly in driver monitoring as it is further evidence that Gestigon are not to be feared. Gestigon were working with Renault since 2015:
https://www.gestigon.com/newsreader/renault-and-gestigon-work-on-next-generation-driver-monitoring/
SEE are not going to have a monopoly and neither is SmartEye. We can split up the market nicely between us but we don't want one of the current also-rans gaining strength and taking a piece of our pie.
Another piece of groundbreaking research done by leading scientists using Angle's product. Impressive how the rate of these is building. I see this as a virtuous circle of groundbreaking research using Parsortix that other leading researchers see and want to build on and will have to use Parsortix if they want to do so and then they publish and then others want to build on their research. Deepening penetration into the research world then helps us penetrate big pharma and clinical applications. Loving being invested here, as ever :-)
With £15m in the bank as at 31 Oct 2018 we have plenty of money to see us through.
Operating cash outflow in H1 was only £(4.3m) and this has been fairly typical. At 12 Jan 2019, Finncap forecast zero new shares issued between now and at least the end of FY21.
Regarding the June 2018 fundraise, Newland, our CEO said "The additional funding will … extend the cash runway significantly past the expected timescale for FDA clearance."
I’d argue that there is a good possibility that there won’t be any more fundraises even after FY21, but that is more speculative. Newland knows he has a small company with a product that could be massive globally. He’ll not try to go it alone but will partner up with the big boys to do all the heavy lifting.
Anyway - Newland isn’t going to want dilution. Newland owns 4.9% of the company and its less than 6 months since Angle created a share scheme heavily incentivising Newland on share price performance, with the share scheme paying out nothing unless they increase the share price at least 170% and only paying out the max if they increase the share price by 440%.
Share prices do not tend to move in straight lines in either direction.
Significant RNS this morning. I think more significant than the $7m quoted.
The fact that this is Joyson and an additional model with an existing US customer points towards GM as the automaker.
GM has us in the Cadillac CT6 and there have been rave reviews of our tech in the CT6. GM have pointed to wider roll out of this tech so to have a first announcement of new models being done with SEE confirms we are in this plan. More significantly, today's RNS announces that this new work is using our FOVIO chip. The CT6 was using older tech from before the FOVIO chip was available. Shifting to the chip is significant investment of resources by GM that would indicate they have made a long term decision that we are their partner of choice. No one else offers an automative grade DMS chip that could be easily swapped into Supercruise architecture built around FOVIO. If they had any doubts about using us for their coming wider roll out, why would they bother investing in this redesign of Supercruise to incorporate our chip now? They probably wouldn't. They would probably carry on using the SEE tech they were already using as a stop-gap before making the ir longer term DMS supplier decision. GMs wider DMS roll out is going to be worth a lot more than $7m and this investment by GM in reengineering Supercruise to use FOVIO points heavily to use winning that work.
Very happy with the momentum in good news in Q1 of calendar 2019:
10 Jan BREAKTHROUGH CANCER RESEARCH USING PARSORTIX
11 Feb Research into role of immune cells in cancer
25 Feb CUSTOMER DEMONSTRATES NEW USE FOR PARSORTIX
28 Feb FIRST SUBJECTS ENROLLED IN OVARIAN CANCER STUDY
7 Mar ENROLMENT COMPLETE FOR FDA CLINICAL STUDY
4 Apr AACR 2019
News momentum building as we head towards exciting updates on outcome of FDA study and filing with FDA.
Share price up 50% from the beginning of calendar Q1 but still way below where I believe it can go in my humbble opinion.
No, Not a ramper. Just someone who loves being invested in this company. I love the potential this has to improve/save lives, reduce cancer care costs and line my pockets. I'mm reminding myself that there can be many a slip between cup and lip but I still love it :-)
ET. Re number of shares: That is one of the most ignorant amateur misconceptions out there. The number of shares is entirely irrelevant.
Rather than thinking " I'll have a million shares in Google and a million shares in seeing machines" and blindly accepting that will mean I get a £2.4m Tesco investment (£2.40/share) and £9.0m in Rolls (£9.00/share), I should be considering the risks and rewards of the investment and how that fits with the overall strategy of the portfolio and deciding on an appropriate asset allocation. That will lead me to determining an appropriate £investment figure in the company. Once I have decided the £ investment figure it is entirely irrelevant whether my £1m investment is a million shares of £1 or 100 million shares of 1p.
Buying shares is not like buying eggs where the number of eggs available is important (because people buy the number of eggs they need and not the value of eggs they need). With eggs, constraining the number could make prices more sensitive. With a company, the number of shares is completely irrelevant, it is the £market cap and the % free float that matters.
I suspect you know this and are just playing silly bgrs, If you do not know this, or do not believe me, I'd suggest you get studying very quickly as your lack of basic understanding could be very dangerous to your wealth.
Even if the car company would discuss it - they would have to be sure that any extra paid up front by them would be more than recouped by savings on initial projected car volumes on initially included models. Lets say 250,000 cars for example. So to get an extra $1m you'd need to give more than a $4/unit discount per car. But, the future of SEE is pinned on the initial order expanding to cover more cars and more models. What was it Veoneer said? Actual number of cars for their contracts is usually triple the initial projected number (paraphrasing)? SEE hope for more than tripling with us still as the supplier. Trouble then arises that on the expanded models and numbers, the car company will then expect the more than $4/unit discount to continue. They just will not wear a reversal of the discount. Once you discount, you are locked in. And you cannot recoup the further discounts with further inflated engineering fees as adding future models doesn't need anything like the same amount of engineering work.
You are better of with minimum initial (eg engineering fees) and maximum $/unit, to the extent that you do not want your $/unit to be excessively high compared to potential future competition.
Hi Seeing2020,
It is not unique to SEE but neither is it universal to all AIM shares. Shares where it is likely to have the largest impact are (i) Companies that have a rather binary future, ie they will either have massive success or go to nothing. SEE is 1 example. Another would be AGL. (ii) Companies where that binary future has a reasonable chance of becoming clearer in the short term. eg SEE and AGL. (iii) Companies where IG have recently removed the ability to make bets with guaranteed stops - this has happened with SEE but not AGL, you can still bet with guaranteed stops on AGL.
Criteria (i) and (ii) make it very attractive to bet on these shares with guaranteed stops which then makes (iii) have a big impact. (i) and (ii) also make it more likely there wil be a significant impact on the share from the change in EU spread betting rules. With SEE, the share price could be suffering from both and this could be significant.. maybe.. or maybe I'm way way off the mark!!! I've bet that I'm right but maybe I'm not and maybe we'll never know as changes in share price over the next few days will happen for other reasons too, not just the market normalising.
Someone asked what the effect will be in the next few days. I'm not sure. Many of those who have had to reduce their positions because of my theoretical idea will not be able to replace their shares in the coming days because they will not be able to afford to without leverage. Many of them will not want to because many won't be able to get guaranteed stop losses. The recovery in share price will have to come from other people realising the share price has become artificially undervalued. That could be tomorrow when everyone from this board piles in thinking I'm right. It could be after the results come out when we discover there really was no real reason for the drop (bad news we didn't know about). It could be longer... I'm a gambler disguised as a long term holder and the reverse.
Hi DR777,
You point out the large number of trades made with a round number of shares (eg 75,000 shares) rather than being a trade of a round value (eg £3,000). As you say, purchases and sales of shares by PIs are often at round £values. The round numbers we are seeing is entirely consistent with my theory. Spread bets are placed in "pounds per point". A £1/point bet is effectively the same as 100 shares. Spread bettors tend to bet in multiples of £1/point, especially in shares with such low share price as SEE where there is no point owning less than 100 shares. When you make the bet, you are asked how many £/point you want to bet, not how many £share value equivalents you want. And when the bet closes, you are effectively selling multiples of 100 shares. So if I am right, you would expect to see lots of trades where the number of shares ends in 00.
I have a theory on this drop over the last couple of days and I've been taking advantage to buy at the reduced prices. Didn't want to say anything until I'd finished buying what I wanted - which I just did 2 mins before close today. There is a good chance I could be completely wrong but I thought I'd tell you now in case anyone is interested. There is probably still time to take advantage after today.
Anyway. The theory (which is a guess!): The drop is driven by the change in spread betting rules and change in spread betting company policies and is nothing to do with Seeing Machines itself. Take IG for example, one of the biggest spread betting companies that takes bets on AIM stocks. IG offers long term spread bets on SEE share price, you can bet on what the share price will be in March, June, Sept or Dec. The March contract expires at 16:30 today, 19 March. Making such a spread bet is similar to actually owning the shares themselves in that you benefit from rises and lose on falls but it has the twin advantages of being able to leverage your position and being able to set guaranteed stop losses. Say I make a bet and set a guaranteed stop at 4p, and then the company goes bust overnight, I only lose the difference between the price when I bought and 4p. I don't lose the whole drop in share price to 0p. IG only took long positions on SEE shares, not shorts.
So, a number of people will have owned long spread bets on SEE shares which will have expired today (as I said, there are 4 dates a year when bets expire). Normally, people with expiring bets would simply have taken out new long term bets on the SEE share price but... this time there is a problem with doing that... It is now much harder to buy long term bets on SEE than it used to be so my theory is that some people have been unable to roll their bets and have thus effectively had to reduce their positions in SEE which has led to a fall in share price. I guessed this would happen before the fall happened and have been watching with my finger on the buy button.
So why was it hard for people to roll bets this time? A couple of reasons.
(1) Since you could first buy SEE spread bets expiring today, changes in EU rules on spread betting have made it much more difficult for some investors to make bets and, for many, reduced the size of the bets that can be made. Existing bets could remain open but it is hard to replace the bets when they expire.
(2) IG have stopped offering guaranteed stops on SEE bets and this reduces the attractiveness of the bet.
You've noticed that the value of SEE shares traded in the fall was relatively small which is consistent with my theory.
However, I could be completely wrong. I think the shareprice is currently artificially depressed because of something completely unrelated to the performance of the Seeing Machines company itself, but I could be completely wrong and maybe someone out there really does know something we don't. I've made my bet and crossed f