Member Info for Senator1

Yes of course when a lease ends you have a new calculation but these leases are very long term, 10-15 years and remember as part of the negotiation the landlord may even have to offer more free periods to hold the lessee particularly in a poor business environment. So even if we are talking about the situation when a lease ends it is not a fair assumption that the new contract has a requirement for full lease payments from the outset. A lessee like bme knows there has been capital amortisation during their tenancy and will want that reflected in the new lease terms in some form.

It is a non issue as the accounts dont follow the cash payment on leases. The accounts will charge the effective lease charge over the period from the start of the lease so there is no material step up when it goes from rent free periods to paying periods as that is all accounted for from the beginning of the lease. This accounting approach is followed in many other areas where there is divergence between cash and accounting charges. They don't have to note materiality as there is no material step up as they account for it right from the start charging to the P&L a "smoothed" number of the real annual cost and that's the reason there is no note on a material step up in costs because there isn't one.

The share has risen because it did what the stock market always does, it had overshot to the downside. The fact that things have now stabilised as co delivered in the middle of their guidance has allowed the overshoot to come out of the share price. Its not yet discounting an improvement as £2.3/5 is FV on what we currently know.

They reduced their shareholding by 1% presumably to make room for the converts they agreed to do which from memory was £2M. That would have been some of the selling pressure recently. If this stock was US listed it would be worth at least twice its current value. The US anticipates the growth, the UK is more show me.

In a poor year for BME we know the post tax free cashflow was £321M. The way they define this metric is after all lease costs but before bank and capital market debt. If you assume cost of equity at 12% and debt at 6.5% you get a weighted discount rate of 10.6%. Use this to discount the free cashflow and subtract debt and add cash and you get a FV per share of £2.36. This includes no operating improvement and of course no further declines which management suggested they could mitigate, so based on that I think the current share price is cheap and if they can get the UK operating margin back to double digits and LfL growth positive, then it is very cheap. If I revised the calculation and used a cost of equity of 10% then this gives a fair value per share of £2.85 so maybe a reasonable target over next few weeks is £2.50 ish a share. This management team are far superior to the idiot who ran things before as they are real retailers and not accountants trying to be operating retailers. If I were short this share, I would be covering as the outlook is skewed to the upside. If they all start covering then even £2.50 ish could be reached very quickly. What the shorts do will be the early tangible signal . I would like to see another 15-20% upside day and then it gets very uncomfortable for them.

With year end cash at £342m and the final dvd costing £61M, the cash position of the group is very strong and I'm surprised they didn't announce a "token" share buyback, even £75M at these depressed levels. The lower SKU count going forward is going to have a material impact on cash usage and if they can increase lfl sales in the UK and improve the margin, this share could double from these levels.

BME trades at 5.17x ev/adj. ebitda pre ifrs 16, this is a very cheap stock. Net Bank debt at year end was £656M and adj. ebitda pre IFRS 16 £459M which shows the cash generation capabilities relative to the non lease debt. I

SP target 70p. No timeframe on their target or rationale how they picked that number. the research piece itself is not research just copy and paste from rns's. pretty pathetic. Creo will be acquired that is 100% going to happen. Best time to do it is probably after they get the cash from the sale of the 49% for circa £30M. The big institutions bought in at 24p for the most part so it will need to be north of that. 40p would be my guestimate and that still leaves a lot of value for the buyer.

Capitalisation & Liquidity are two totally different things. Did the CEO say they did it to "capitalise" the business? If he did he needs a lesson on the difference and IF he said that, he is a financial clown

The management are just clowns. To leave the issue of the need for further funding outstanding in the way they have is incompetent. They should never have done a £500K funding when they did when the share price was climbing back to 3p. They let the air out of the share for such a small amount and that was grossly stupid. They sent a message they desperately needed money but that amount was only a plaster on the issue. How they and their advisors thought this was a good idea is beyond me.

Shambolic. These guys are real amateurs. I would expect first year business graduates to do a better presentation. The demo presentations they were doing earlier in the year were even worse. 300 odd paying subscribers is an embarrassment. The CEO must be smoking something, he shouldn't be.

First, the £56M is net cash income so repayment of debt is never before or after this number as it never hits the P&L. Second we don't use the term amortisation of debt, it is just repayment. Amortisation is reserved for goodwill & intangibles, the amortisation of which does hit the P&L but not the net cash income.

Second, amortisation most certainly is a negative to the balance sheet, it is the credit to the P&L debit.

Third, the £56M is net cash income, depreciation is not relevant. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Your fourth point is as rubbish as all the rest, as the £56m referred to is net cash income so excludes all depreciation & amortisation which are non cash items.

More uninformed rubbish.

True, but u cant make up rubbish! and your post is total rubbish.

Partly wrong is the understatement of the day. You are nearly fully wrong as you exclude Hold Co costs and then the costs of NESF plc. And apart from all that EBITDA is not the profit return to equity. In FY 25 the cash available for distributions was £56M but that excludes £55M of D&A which means they are paying out cash that is really needed to re-invest in the asset base to maintain the status quo. When you recognise that deferring these costs catches up with you eventually, as you can see from the strategic reset, this does not make an adequate return for equity. You can fool yourself if you want ignoring the required maintenance and think you are making more "than most think". I think the mis-step is yours not "most".

It is true that on ex DVD date the value of a dividend is (theoretically) net neutral. However, this misses the cornerstone of valuation. An entity will increase value if the money they retain earns more than their cost of equity. Re-investment drives growth but it has to meet the above equation otherwise you are destroying value. What about this garbage? In FY 25 this produced a net of £26.8M (if I exclude the revaluation loss, so being generous), the average equity capital was £583M, giving a RoE of 4.6%. that is way less than the cost of equity which I estimate, given NESF is sub-scale, at 9-9.5%, therefore it trades at 50% of Nav and that is entirely consistent with what it should do. This is garbage because the structure is all wrong, there are too many snouts at the trough taking all the money and that leaves nothing for equity. Scale is the problem with all these vehicles as the costs are too high and this is aided by opaque accounting. The Boards and their real bosses (the inv manager) will never address this as they lose out. The business could be strategic but as presently structured it is garbage and will remain so until the elephant in the room is addressed but that is like asking turkeys to vote for christmas.

They will, they have a £130M buffer but they will only have an approx 0.15% weighting so its not a huge amount of passive buying. I estimate £25-30M so its something but not a game changer. You will still be left with one of the worst IR communicators in the FTSE ALL share and that will have a price. It just not suited to public ownership when you have one very large shareholder and so will be largely ignored by institutions, passives aside.

I think he wants to take it private. With the EBT and other shareholders he has 70%. He cant force out minorities until he has 90%. Liontrust cant back him in the take private but Inflexion can. They know the Healthcare side well and so it would be pretty easy for them to get on top of the non Healthcare side. The public listing will be a nuisance for Inflexion as they will have to mark down the valuation of their 40% because of the implied valuation on this based on Data's share price. That will be a real headache as that id first thing any auditor will point to. Why would Danson want to go from 60% to 70%? I agree he doesn't need it to make the transaction work but it is always nice when you sell something at £1.5 and get a chance to buy it back at under £0.7 . The issue he has is how to do it without the market noticing because the minute he buys the share price goes back to £1.5. If I were Inflexion I would get authority on PIPEs and certainly get to 4.99% as Danson's move is impossible to conceal. I have always thought the main board listing is just a diversion while these two get ready to strike.

They wouldn't even attempt to open that discussion with the Pref holders as they know it would be stupid. The existing share base provides a 25% cushion to the Pref holders against further gross asset value declines. If they allowed a £100m buyback that would reduce to 15% which they would never allow. In a forced sale 15% would be the minimum haircut applied by buyers and then the Prefs would be in danger of a partial right off. They are probably feeling uncomfortable with the current 25% as they are certainly not being paid for the risk inherent in that cushion. There is only one solution here and that is the Board putting all contracts on a 1 month rolling basis and putting itself up for sale, like Bluefield. Year to date it is up 25% and NESF down 8.4%. What should have happened if the Boards were thinking about shareholders was a 3 way Nav-nav merger between NESF-FSFL and BSIF and create the listed scale the market wants. Strong Boards disentangle the existing contracts and then tender for the required contracts after merger. This would require strong, independently minded Chairmen who could divorce themselves from the investment management group who put them there to begin with. That is never going to happen so you have the listed garbage that will go absolutely nowhere but then the people with the contracts don't really care. The longer they get to milk this opportunity the better for them. From a shareholder perspective this whole sector is total garbage and best avoided.

Very small trades again doing the damage. Since jut after 8 only one trade is greater than £10K. IR wont answer the question why the EBT is settling the cash bonuses by selling shares. The finance team have done such a terrible job in building a share register that there are just no retail buyers to counteract the small sellers particularly when DATA are not in the market themselves. Danson got a lot of cash when he sold 20M shares at £1.5, wonder when he will step in and start buying, that's the signal to watch for, until then don't spend another cent on this share. IR do not deserve the support from retail.

I know all that but HL have confirmed to me that they do not submit block proxy votes, when they told me this first I asked them to go back and check and confirm in writing.. They also said they do not divulge any details on the beneficiary and merely submit party x casts y shares. So the legal owner casts nothing but merely informs that unidentified beneficiaries cast in the way I described. This leaves the company secretary in a position where he has no cross check against the information submitted by, in this case, HL. Whether the information also goes in to Broadridge or any other intermediary is irrelevant as the source of the beneficiary voting is HL and can only be HL. The fact that the beneficiary has the right within 30 days to seek confirmation that the vote is cast is also irrelevant. I'm not doubting the vote is notified by HL, I am questioning the position of the company secretary of the listed company who is placed in a position where the legal owner has cast nothing but through intermediaries has communicated in the way I described above. The co. secretary has no possible way to cross check this information as the nominee structure is private between the client and platform, the details of which cannot be divulged. I know that HL don't indemnify every listed co. they inform in such a manner and so the co. secretary is in a difficult position. Cross checking does not mean you accept the the word of the source of the information and all the more so when that party is not prepared to indemnify the information. He is obligated to take on board the votes of the legal owners which he can cross check. HL have confirmed they do not submit proxy votes in their name but use the method I have described.