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I suspect Oddo are a result of some arcane French listing rules that make it compulsory to publish research in the French market if we do so in the UK market. So we have to have broker coverage over there, and whoever we chose would likely take a dim view on the fact we have no French operations, a handful of French employees (posssibly only one in Crinelli…?) & no French sales. And that is ignoring Brexit politics & vaccine wars. They most likely wonder why on earth we are still listed there…

My opinion is that Oddo are seen as short term pain and necessary evil by GM, as if we are in the process of planning a delisting then he won't really care what they do. Not much point getting rid of them and hiring another French broker as we would likely get the same result and all it would do is cost another chunk of cash.

We know that GM wasn't interested in institutional money last year due to focusing on Covid and we also know that they can't raise money on LSE at a discount whilst they remain on Euronext (not that this should matter at the current price level!). I suspect the appointment of Numis was partly about laying the groundwork for a future move to the main market & at the same time accelerating the transfer of the shareholder base from Euronext to LSE. It was 70/30 last September, but 9 months on it must be closer to 50/50; the daily volumes suggest as much.

It's a fascinating setup & very unusual indeed, an almost perfect case study of being on the 'wrong exchange'

The below podcast is well worth a listen for more on wrong exchanges;

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-find-compounders-in-unusual-places-artem-fokin/id1459155018?i=1000504011016

Of course all of the above is speculation, and DHSC clouds everything right now, but I'd be very very surprised if they retain the French listing beyond this year. It just adds legal complexity, cost, confusion & depressed valuations.

Re. Oddo, I think they’ve simply taken the **** due to the fact we’re a British company listed on Euronext, add in Brexit & the Q1 vaccine wars between the UK & Europe and you get a spurious €4.10 target.. They would have been well aware that their lowball valuation would kill any potential bounce post 9th April & cause frustration for UK shareholders whilst aiding shorters on Euronext.

Of course this may be wide of the mark, but it makes a lot of sense to me…

Updated risk assessment is here;

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/991135/3_June_2021_Risk_assessment_for_SARS-CoV-2_variant_DELTA.pdf

My heart sank reading this, how on earth have we managed to get into such a shocking situation again.

Significantly more transmittable, possible higher risk of hospitalisation, increased chance of vaccine escape. A f******* nightmare combination.

"Delta is predominant and all analyses find that it has a very substantial growth advantage. The observed high growth rate is most likely to be due to a combination of place based context, transmissibility and immune escape. Both English and Scottish analyses continue to support the finding of reduced vaccine effectiveness which has increased to high confidence. New early data from England and Scotland suggest a possible increased risk of hospitalisation compared to Alpha. The priority investigations are vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and transmission, household secondary attack rate corrected for vaccination, characterisation of the generation time, viral load and period of infectivity, and epidemiological studies of reinfections."

@Bluelight, definitely some funny business going on. I've always had a feeling that shares in which PI's initially do really well are earmarked for 'balancing out' by the market mafia. Plenty made hay up to the end of January, but since that point pretty much every PI buyer will be down / sold and lost money. Fundamentally, with the exception of DHSC, we are so much stronger than this time last year, and yet we sit only 50p a share higher!

Ideally we would all just go on holiday for a month or two to somewhere exotic and forget the price, but that's a bit tricky...

They French seem obsessed with ensuring we end up in the red, that's just 2 green days on the bourse in the last 13 - absolutely comical. That's an excellent FT article, although I think it's far more likely that large corporates will carry out regular testing than telling employees to take a home test if they feel ill. For one thing you are relying on them actually following these instructions, but we also know that asymptomatic cases are high, so it's no good taking a reactive approach.

We have the private relationships already in place, credibility (not a bad intro if you can say you've done the office based testing for AZN for the last 12 months!) & manufacturing scale to take a leading long term position in such a market. Late entrants may well find there are significant barriers with regards to trust & pricing (if you can't manufacture at large scale then the margins will likely not be great).

Another buy for around £50k of shares, a real change in behaviour today - I suppose it’s not that surprising that the serious money waited for things to settle down.

8k loss in 3 weeks is not good, hopefully you’ve learned something from it - otherwise the market will eat you for breakfast

It’s all to do with the Bourse. It’s not just Nova that are effected by this sentiment; Eurobio & Biosynex are also floating in the doldrums despite delivering strong numbers & a buoyant European testing market.

As I said earlier, last night after close Biosynex reported €115m revenue for the last 2 months & €190m for 5 months vs full year expectations of €250m, they are on track to beat full year in the first half… today their share price is currently up by just 2% and is 10% below 2 weeks ago. It’s incredible, there is just no interest in diagnostics shares right now.

I think the reason must be a lack of institutional involvement and possibly private investor burnout? Either way it’s very bizarre to see, all three companies are cash rich & fantastically placed for the future, the market is huge & global, and Covid appears likely to remain a problem for a long time to come. Certainly I can’t see any country allowing tourists in and out without testing for at least the next 12 months minimum.

Some very chunky buys going through today, including one just now for £750k... my immediate thought was that the RNS of Barclays & JPM as joint brokers has possibly coincided with some post IPO research being released to certain clients...

Why oh why would you realise a 73p a share loss on a company that you think is 'fantastic' only 3 weeks after it's IPO? You do realise that you can hold shares for longer than couple of weeks right? I've bought at 335, 289 & 298... once the market realises the profitability here it will perform very well I think.

Someone mentioned Biosynex a couple of days ago, I looked into them and wasn't impressed vs NCYT, as their gross margins are much lower and there isn't much info about their product range. However, they released an outstanding trading update last night which should be a good proxy for our H1 results;

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210602005801/fr/

"€ 190m (1) vs. 154 M € for the whole of 2020 (2)
High growth outlook for 2021

Regulatory News:

BIOSYNEX (Paris: ALBIO) announces a turnover at the end of May 2021 (1) of € 190 million. This very strong increase in activity is driven by sustained international sales and by the dynamic of PCR and SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests in France. Self-tests, which were sold to the general public and to local authorities at the start of 2021 in many European countries, also contributed to this growth.

During the last three months, BIOSYNEX has been able to meet the strong demand for self-tests thanks to increased production capacities and a shortened production cycle by the ramp-up of the new manufacturing unit based in Alsace. At the same time, the company has benefited from numerous spinoffs from its exploration of new markets abroad. International growth therefore shows a much higher increase over the first 5 months of 2021 than that of the domestic market."

The company is valued at just €254m at present, so it's not just NCYT that are mega cheap... commentators on the Bourse are in sheer disbelief at the pricing anomaly... I've added a small amount as a trade ahead of results on 21st July as it seems a no brainer...

It's also surely an excellent read across for our international sales, as if international markets have been that receptive to Biosynex then with our product range, approvals & distributor network, sales should be flying.

Strange times - it's almost as if the French market is completely blind to the commercial success of small cap diagnostics companies at present, however over the next few years the cash generated will turn both NCYT & Biosynex into much larger enterprises that are impossible to ignore..

@levincoolpal, you missed a key word re. the travel market; 'GLOBAL'.

We may or may not have 30% market share in the UK, that is unclear right now but we certainly have a strong position. Today's RNS stated;

"The Company aims to capture a wider share of the growing global travel market for COVID-19 testing with the three-gene test"

We may be targeting a 5% share in every country in which we are authorised to sell Genesig... so pretty much everywhere in the world inc. the USA.

@Bing, my first thought was to check the wording that AZN uses when making announcements;

"AstraZeneca PLC ("AstraZeneca") announces that it, and its wholly owned subsidiary AstraZeneca Finance LLC, priced a six tranche global bond offering totalling $7bn on 25 May 2021."

Coincidence? ;)

"SNPsig® EscapePLEX SARS-CoV-2 is a first-to-market assay panel"

This epitomises the company and why I'm proud to be a long term shareholder here, they have been first to market on multiple occasions and are adding real value to the global cause. Don't care one iota if the share price remains unchanged today, IMO it's a matter of time before such a quality outfit either re-rates or is acquired...

Guillermo Raimondo is the Chief Commercial Officer, 'responsible for the groups global commercial strategy and it's execution'. Kevin has been hired with a specific remit of 'entry and scaling into the Americas markets'. They are very different roles...

All very exciting for the medium to long term strategy. What I would really like to see are £5-20m bolt on acquisitions in local markets to shortcut many of the typical barriers to organic growth. I mentioned Dechra Pharmaceuticals last week, they have executed such a strategy to perfection. Of course, it can't be all at once - they performed between 1-2 acquisitions each year from 2012 to present, varying in size from £5m all the way up to £100m more recently. It's bulked them into a formidable company.

I'd like to see us leverage our cash balance to execute any deals with a mixture of cash + debt, avoiding any equity element until the share price recovers. We are a very unusual £250m market cap, you certainly wouldn't see a diagnostics IPO today that raised £90m at a £250m valuation with cash generation like Primer Design...

Nice post 1BB, 'primary research' is always very useful indeed. The thing is, with the current hostile environment towards test prices, why on earth would we be shouting to the market about how much money we were making? I think this fact is as much to do with the lack of promotion as anything else.

GM reported revenue generation on a regular basis up until the day before they settled their loans. 2nd June 2020 was the final monthly update, 3rd June 2020 was the loan settlement date. Since that date exactly one year ago, there have been only 3 revenue updates; half year trading update, half year results, full year trading update. The suspension of monthly revenue updates was one of the main reasons that the share price fell back to £2.10 last summer, as all of the speculative money went elsewhere... Did this change anything come the autumn? Nope. Hence why I suspect GM is sanguine about the current share price

Kept down? I mean there is zero volume to make it rise! Just 21k shares trades on Euronext so far & 44k on AIM, that's about as quiet as it's ever been... just did a quick check and the lowest AIM volume since 31/01/20 was 7th September 2020 at 205,942 - I wonder if we'll beat it today? I actually take this as a good sign, as it shows we are completely off the radar of new investors in both the UK & France

@Larry, has anyone actually seen the analyst note from ODDO with the €4.10 price target / underperform rating?

I find it unbelievable, they must be forecasting revenue going back to say €30m per annum over the longer term to justify such a low terminal value…

Do you know whether they cover any other growth stocks on Euronext Paris?

That makes sense Kaeren, speed was highlighted in their 23rd April blog post;

https://blog.primerdesign.co.uk/global-bioinformatics-surveillance-drives-innovation-in-sars-cov-2-variant-detection-tests/

“Novacyt’s SNPsig® kits use the company’s proprietary genotyping method to identify SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. The assays can be used on Novacyt’s selected genesig® family of instruments or on any real-time PCR machine with the ability to test across fluorescence channels, providing a rapid on-site alternative or complementary ability to next generation sequencing/off-site analysis.”

If we can be seen as complimentary to Nanopore etc then that can only be a good thing…

Would also like to know just how ‘proprietary’ our genotyping method actually is - have we developed a competitive advantage and in the process created a niche market?

Glad that the LumiraDX link has been useful & thanks to everyone else that posts quality, constructive research on here.

Now for another comparison that I also think is really interesting; Oxford Nanopore.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/30/oxford-nanopore-to-float-on-london-stock-exchange

Extracts from the article;

“In what the firm describes as a “pivotal year”, Oxford Nanopore’s fortunes have been transformed by the pandemic. Since the outbreak, it has won contracts worth £144m from the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, all of which were awarded without competitive tender due to the emergency circumstances. The sum dwarfs its 2019 revenues of £52m.”

Given its technological progress in the past year, Berenberg analyst Tom Jones estimates the business is worth far more, £4bn-plus, while other analysts have pencilled in up to £7b.”

“But the big growth is expected to come from its DNA/RNA sequencing kit, which is used in many areas including cancer and human genetics research, and to monitor and detect new Covid-19 variants around the world. The kit was used to identify the Brazilian variant. The company has offices in the US, Singapore and China, and employs 600 people globally.”

The firm said: “These advances made 2020 a pivotal year for us. However, it is clear to us that we are still only in the foothills of what is possible.”

I think it’s safe to assume Nanopore are one of the four companies on the NHS VoC Framework, no idea on the others but will also have a dig around…

The key question is how does SNPSig + Q16/Q32’s compare to Nanopore’s solution? I’d imagine nowhere near as polished given the cash they have spent but is it in the same ballpark?

To me, the fact that we have been included in the NHS VoC framework as part of such a small pool suggests we are comparable… otherwise why bother including us at all?

Once listed, will their valuation act as a magnet for our lowly market cap? It’s got to be a logical possibility if we can deliver an attractive roadmap & get promoted in the right circles…

@Poidster, not sure if you read the thread I posted earlier this week regarding LumiraDX?

They are going to be listing on NASDAQ in a couple of months and have a proposed valuation of $5.1b, their pitch deck is titled; "Transforming Community-Based Healthcare"

Their presentation is here;

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fcfb6a6de407d5e35d28f10/t/60816db74fbe6204af35df8d/1619094970622/LumiraDx+-+CAHC+April+2021.pdf

Page 11 shows their estimates of the total addressable market for their platform to be $31b, this includes infectious diseases, diabetes, cardiovascular disease & coagulation disorders. Nothing on cancer but fully agree this would be the logical next addition.

I did some high level analysis and couldn't believe how well we compare, particularly given our current valuation which sits at £260m / $360m vs their $5b. I'd be very interested to know what you think? Is the LumiraDX presentation effectively a harbinger for our to-be-revealed long term strategy?

Normally I wouldn't consider a comparison with a US IPO to be relevant, as financially & operationally they are leagues ahead, but with our cash resources, world class R&D, existing operational prowess & embedded global relationships, I don't think that's the case here...

It begs the question; how on earth are we valued at the current level?