Member Info for ShearClass

Just need to raise $494m and that Liberum note will become relevant, I'll await that day with interest but until then this is of no interest as an investment.

Berenberg refused to offer stock online for nearly 10 minutes at 28.5p (hence why you have so many fill and kills paying over) and then Singer come in and drop the bid to 28p... classic MM double team. There seems to be a determination to stop shares breaking out at the moment, of course it's very different if the action is in the other direction.

Also just spotted more details on Apples VR plans; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-13/apple-reality-pro-headset-plans-3d-mixed-reality-world-games-video-service-lafgxl1e?srnd=technology-vp

“The most interesting job listing is one that specifically calls out the development of a 3D mixed-reality world, suggesting that Apple is working on a virtual environment that is similar to the metaverse—though don’t expect Apple to embrace that term. Its marketing chief said at a recent event that metaverse is “a word I’ll never use.”

“Here’s what we already knew: The headset itself is likely to be priced between $2,000 and $3,000 because it’s a high-end product that will pack a Mac-level M2 chip, more than 10 cameras placed outside and inside the device, and the highest-resolution displays ever featured in a mass-market headset.”

“We also know that the device will run a new operating system dubbed realityOS, which will include mixed-reality versions of core Apple apps like Messages, FaceTime and Maps. The first version of the operating system, codenamed Oak, is wrapping up internally and should be ready for the new hardware next year.”

Once their headset is released the masses will start to take notice IMO.

I’d say it looks pretty likely to me OT, I’d be surprised if the senior business developer was liking it if they weren’t involved… Seems to be lots to look forward to in the new year. I also liked the ambition to be working with 100 of the Fortune 500 companies in 18 months time vs 20 right now, that suggests explosive growth lies ahead. If they achieve that then no reason a NASDAQ listing can’t happen.

The release of LINK is only one piece of the jigsaw and in my mind it's release is like planting a flag on the moon, it's symbolic and marks the start of the next chapter. It's about executing in line with expectations and shows management can be trusted to deliver what they promise.

For a v0.1 I was very happy, there are always going to be improvements to make and it's far more important to launch on time (and with a strong launch partner list) than suffer from organisational OCD trying to get it perfect.

As for breakeven, there is a clear path to €20m+ revenues as far as my high level assumptions go...

€10m+ from education (university license fees etc), €10m+ from enterprise (this is already their target for 2023-25 so could well be exceeded with LINK).

It's also worth bearing in mind what the impact would be if a couple of our named multinational launch partners signed long term license contracts... i.e. KPMG US have 35k employees, a €3.5M contract to give them all an ENGAGE license would be chicken feed vs what they spend with the likes of Microsoft, Adobe etc.

Further there is precedent for peers such as Accenture making large investments in VR, i.e. https://www.consultancy.uk/news/29463/accenture-buys-60000-oculus-headsets-for-vr-training

€20m turnover at 80% gross margins would provide enough gross profit to cover a fairly large organisation (first half overheads were €4.2m). I'd expect a market cap multiples of the current £45m if we can get there.

Littlened, when it’s private it will be nearly impossible to sell your shares should you want / need to. Not a situation most people want to be in, especially given the lack of communication.

This sort of behaviour brings the whole market into disrepute as far as I'm concerned. If you go public it shouldn't be possible to then take the company private again 2 years later at a 35% discount to the IPO price and 50% below the all time high.

LSE needs significant reform in my opinion, there are multiple examples from the ASX which should be implemented here ASAP;

- Admission Documents have to be publicly available at least a month before listing
- Shares with material news / placings have to go into a trading halt as soon as anyone outside of the company knows (especially brokers)
- Trading hours should be 10-4 so investors have a chance to read news properly before the market opens
- Significant shareholders should have to provide full transparency on the dates that they bought / sold shares and this should be publicly available
- Reporting should be quarterly
- The threshold for publicly disclosing short positions should be reduced from 0.5% to 0.1% to prevent hedgies gaming the system
- MIFID rules should removed so that private investors can get access to proper broker research at the same time as institutions

The UK market is tilted far too far in favour of city institutions and 'old money', the influx on new money during Covid was the perfect chance to reform but if anything things have got worse and most of the new crowd will have a very negative view of the market. If they don't sort it out then the UK market faces a slow and painful death.

Every day since the profit warning Peel were sat on the bid absorbing buys to clear the sellers line of stock. That changed with the surge of volume earlier this afternoon that signalled the end of the seller. Now they are bidding for stock and have raised their ask to 66p. The book is flat and buys lead to the share price rapidly rising and profit taking drops it back for a short while, it's all PI driven though, and a move into the 60's over the next day or two looks odds on, now 3 v 1 and 55-58...

Well done with your buying and I'd agree with those targets, it's clear looking at the trading volume + L2 order book that the sellers are either out or on fumes. Considering SPEC had already fallen a country mile this year I think 80-100p is where it should sit post directors buying well over 1% of the company, it's simply been taken way too low.

Looks like the selling may well be done now, rising with every buy… you’d also have to think it very unlikely that the CEO would buy a further 850k / £400k unless he was aware who was selling and how many they had left…

Glad to have inspired you WG213.

I’m not really sure I understand your point on there needing to be a lot of sales spend going forwards? Do you mean hiring more sales heads to push the product so companies fill the available spaces in the education / enterprise plazas?

As I said earlier, I suspect that once smaller online education brands realise they can set up shop near Pearson & Adtalem etc the spaces will sell themselves…

Development wise I find it surprising how much they have achieved on a relatively small budget to date but agree that building out a virtual world and constantly improving things won’t be cheap. 80% gross margins certainly help fund things though.

Ideally I’d like to see a handful of launch partners take a meaningful equity stake to help drive things forward, this may be wishful thinking but most of them have very deep pockets and it would be mutually beneficial.

Let’s see what happens from here, I note there are several comments from Meta employees on DW’s LinkedIn post as well as the mention of deeplinks / hypergrids / inter connecting VR worlds, so there is a lot going on behind the scenes.

Ah Fatboy Slim is the 14th launch partner - just re-read the RNS headline!

I used the desktop app which was fine, although a headset would definitely be better. Yep Pfizer, HSBC & Pearson are part of the 14 launch partners I’ve got 10 from the RNS;

Lenovo
KPMG US
KIA
Stanford Virtual Lab
HTC
Optima Ed
Adtalem
VictoryXR
MTN
Miami Herbert University

Plus

Pearson
HSBC
Pfizer

Didn’t spot an obvious contender for number 14 but there were quite a few companies with live or pending presences in the creative plaza (virtual world society, waking dream XR, mind wise, solar VR, Joy XR)

Just spent an enjoyable hour and a bit in LINK, very impressed overall. Visited the enterprise plaza first, Pfizer are the only company with a live portal at present but HSBC, KPMG, Lenovo, KIA etc all had 'coming soon' notices up, given a few months I suspect there will be some good stuff here as companies show off / promote themselves. I can already imagine smaller companies being attracted to opening a space for brand value alone given the indirect value add from essentially being in the same room as global giants.

The creative plaza was already pretty good, I liked the upside down city above which reminded me of inception, there are quite a few VR companies set up with portals to explore. Again you can already imagine this being a great breakout place in the future that could be full of surprises and reasons to keep coming back. I noticed a cinema sign that was currently out of reach but gives you an idea of the aspirations.

The final stop was the education plaza, of note was Pearson have a portal that is 'coming soon', I don't think that's been reported anywhere to date. The highlight though was Optima Ed who have by far the best designed and extensive metaworld in LINK, within it there are multiple portals covering everything from Ancient Egypt to science lessons, they've clearly invested a lot of time in developing it and it would be fantastic in full VR.

On the whole everything operated very smoothly without a single glitch and there were dozens of other avatars exploring alongside. For a first release it exceeded expectations, David and team have done a marvellous job. I'll check it out on a weekly basis going forward and see what changes I can spot...very exciting times indeed.

Great to see the launch day arrive! Agree it's a very impressive list of launch partners, internationally & industry diverse and a great foundation for rapid growth. I'd not heard of Adtalem before but a quick bit of research filled me with confidence - a $2b market cap listed on NYSE who own the largest nursing university in the US... Looking forward to the investor presentation on Thursday to learn more!

Excellent podcast released today that interviews Steve Grubbs on metaversities;

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virtual-reality-universities-are-already-here-and/id1565851466?i=1000584854137

Plenty of positive mentions for ENGAGE and he reaffirms that the rollout is absolutely flying - from the 10 announced back in April they now have 38 live as of 31/10 and expect to be at 150 by this time next year... All hosted on ENGAGE, which he describes as like 'building on Android or IOS, a wonderful platform"

Some very very positive stuff discussed, safe to say the Victory XR partnership has been a massive success to date.

Worth looking back to Steve's comments on the announcement of the partnership back in April 2020;

"We view ENGAGE as the platform, much like the iPhone is the platform for world of apps. VictoryXR will build a VR school curriculum app on top of this platform which gives every school and every student access to the best equipment, the best teachers and the most effective learning."

30 months in and they've absolute nailed the execution to date, you wonder where things will be in another 2.5 years time? I was also intrigued by the closing comments around Victory XR opening their first AR metaversity next year, could that be one of the exciting pipeline announcements we are waiting for?

Another great spot OT.

I think it’s notable how many multinationals we can link to Engage. VR adds tangible value to teams that are spread around the globe & any subscription cost will be a fraction of annual travel spend. It seems win win for everyone now the technology is there (5g is a huge enabler)

Yep, when an exchange like ASX trades 6.6m shares (more than 1% of ALL) and closes at a day's high of 52p you'd be taking a gamble selling the AIM open at 49p. The fallback is illogical but it's what happens when supply > demand over a short time period. I'd be surprised if we don't get some US funds buying this afternoon, Warratah have already gone past the 3% level and there must be more than just them that has noticed the valuation gap vs peers...

Worth pointing out that ALL updated their significant shareholders list yesterday;

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/61711d27ed0db12cacbcfb5a/t/6360e4d130817f47d1438bcd/1667294418088/2022.11.01+-+Key+Security+Information+Update+%28website%29.pdf

DGR Global are now down to 4.99% / 30.2m shares, this is a decrease of 8m shares since the last update on 20th September. Looking at the ASX jump overnight vs the dump in progress here this morning I think it's clear that they hold their shares on the UK exchange and have likely dumped another few hundred thousand already today.

It could get interesting over the coming weeks if the ASX has no selling pressure and continues to move higher whilst AIM is held back by DGR. If a couple of Aussie institutional investors decide to take advantage of the discount then DGR could be gone before Xmas...

Wow, first up what sensational drill results! Most here have been aware of the valuation gap vs other ASX lithium stocks but even I didn’t expect it to re-rate 34.5% in one day on volume of 6.6m… we are now on the radar of the ASX lithium bulls, this is a proper exchange with huge liquidity & loads of successful mining companies.

Bear in mind you have the likes of Liontown Resources at £2.3b market cap, they have a huge resource on paper and are planning a 500kt PA operation that looks like commencing production in late 2023 vs ALL’s current 255kt operation planned for H224, but does it make any sense for us to be valued at just 14% of their market capitalisation?! Likewise vs Core Lithium & Sigma, the upside from 52p remains huge!