Member Info for Sorcerer

I agree Bakky - at the volumes they're currently reporting, the Covid testing feels relatively marginal, although I guess it kept the team busy when the core business dropped off earlier in the year. The negative is that it really felt like we were heading for our long awaited rerate back in September, but the Covid testing disappointed and that seems to be the thing that the market is currently responding to. I'm still optimistic that it will happen and while the progress made to date is frustratingly not reflected in the share price, it makes it an attractive proposition for new investors. Hopefully that will eventually feed through into some sustained buying, but I think it will need a really strong trigger to draw attention to the company - it still feels like one of the best kept secrets on AIM (and not in a good way!).

Bakky, I've posted my (positive) thoughts on the company's prospects many times before and would imagine that I have done more analysis than most on here of the potential for Yourgene's product range and distribution network to create a revenue generating powerhouse. I have no need to repeat my thoughts on that - simply look back over my previous posts if you want to see them. As I have said a few times recently, that doesn't mean that I can't call out the things that I think have been unimpressive lately and the Covid testing falls into that bracket in my view, as does some of the comms we've had over the past 12 months, which only ever provides an opaque glimpse of future prospects. It's easy for Lyn to stand up and tell us that they're hitting all their targets when he never discloses what they were or are.

Sentiment aside, the share price of any company is a fundamentally a function of two things:

1. The amount of money it generates (or is expected to generate)
2. The number of shares in issue

The latter has been growing like a weed in recent years (to coin a phrase), but the former has not kept pace - revenue growth has been impressive, but costs have grown rapidly too, so the operational gearing that Lyn and Adam Reynolds have often talked about simply hasn't been delivered yet. The thing that will deliver that is a significant sustained uplift in revenues without a corresponding uplift in costs - that's what will generate profits and consequently meaningful returns to shareholders, but we've been reassured that we're on the brink of break-even for three years and apparently still not achieved that.

So, in the absence of any transparency about the forward looking numbers, YGEN continues to be valued on its historic performance and the only time that will change is when we see a clear indicator that the business is now profitable (not just growing, but actually making profits that can be invested or returned to shareholders). That's the point at which the market will ascribe a sensible value to the business and until that point, it's just potential.

Ash, your original post did make me laugh: "It definitely would be prudent to reassure the market that our dual viral test is able to detect the new covid strain. Market sentiment around yourgene would surely improve. RNS tomorrow morning or over the next few days would be helpful."

So, we're basically hoping for an RNS that says: "The company is pleased to announce that the product which provided naff all in terms of revenue during the prior reporting period has been shown to detect the new Covid-19 variant and the company therefore remains confident that this product will continue to contribute naff all to revenues during the next reporting period".

Does anyone know when the notice about the supply of Clarigene tests being restricted to existing customers was removed from the website? From memory the notice went up two to three months ago, but just wondering if anyone spotted it being removed and whether it was removed before or after the latest update?

If there even is a rumour (which I doubt), it didn't start before the market closed - volume way too small for that.

For fun though, back in the early days of Vialogy becoming Premaitha, AR suggested £1.50 should be achievable within 18 months of the (reverse) takeover. We probably only had a quarter of the shares we have today, but we have also moved forward exponentially since then, which offsets at least some of the enlarged share base.

I have a spreadsheet that produces some eye-watering valuations just a few years forward if revenue growth continues on trend (recent 'blip' excepted) and costs stay under control. And we have cash in the bank, no debt and are very close to (or past) breakeven, so no discount for distress.

After being here so long and with so much potential not yet priced in, it would need to be several multiples of the current sp to get my vote.

Precisely ColSoul.

Cooper, why do you have to be on the offensive all the time? Relax a bit, we're all after the same thing. I presume you weren't invested on the day the litigation landed. Maybe, just maybe, those of us who held through that for two years (and have built our positions into a reasonably healthy size since that time) know a thing or two about not panicking during the ups and downs of investing. And maybe after being invested here for over 10 years and riding out every twist and turn of the exciting Vialogy / Premaitha / Yourgene story, we have earned the right to pose legitimate questions about aspects of what the company does without it constituting a treasonable offence.

Thanks Radds - I follow the logic to some extent, but it's still all predicated on trust and it only needs a few outbreaks at major events to knock people's confidence. Maybe we'll all just get used to taking that risk if actions of the honest majority manage to keep the prevalence throughout the population at a low enough level.

Interesting you mentioned Covid-busting masks Gazala - I was thinking the other day about whether you could create and affimer web that sits between two layers of fabric in a face mask to catch any virus particles on the way through. Suspect it would need to be so small that not enough air would get through, or the affimers may need to be in some kind of solution to work, but presumably the virus particles are carried in microscopic moisture droplets, so it might be possible? If not possible in masks, maybe within air filters in air-conditioners and aircraft etc?

I'm extremely positive about everything that Avacta is working on, but I do wonder how much reliance we will be able to place on home testing to allow people to go about their lives completely freely.

The thing I can't get past is the security of the results for any test taken at home. How can anyone prove that a) it was them who took the test (not a relative or friend) and b) that they took the test that day? [Does the test self-destruct or change colour again after 24 hours?]

I guess we could probably rely on it for low-density activities and events, but wouldn't it be far safer to simply accept that all event venues will need to operate some form of rapid testing at or near the point of entry? You turn up at the stadium and get funneled into a (socially distanced) testing booth where you're provided with a bar-coded (and possibly branded, so we could have an advertising revenue stream :-) LFT that you scan to the NHS Covid App on your phone before completing the test and returning it (to a person or a machine). You then head into a waiting area (still socially distancing) until you're sent the results with a time-bound entry ticket to the venue (or a self-isolation red card). If it was all done at home, would anyone really trust that everyone else going to the same venue was playing by the rules? Maybe we could rely on having big fines for people abusing the system, but that would seem pretty hard to police.

Ultimately this wouldn't change the number of tests required (it might increase it, as a lot of people might do their own test before they go), but I just can't see a secure way of relying on the results of a home test, so something like this seems the only way? Maybe every town will be set up like Liverpool, with it's own testing centre which will then issue day passes valid for 24 / 48 / 72 hours?

Genuinely interested on whether people believe there are technology solutions that can overcome this.

I don't understand why criticism of one aspect of the how the company is doing (its approach to communicating with shareholders) is perceived by some as outright condemnation of everything the company is doing. It's not - it's perfectly OK to be pro everything else about the company (and LR for that matter), but point out that it/he could do much better with communication. Nobody is perfect, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't comment about things that could be better - that's how everybody improves, surely?

There's so much potential here - it just needs a light shining on it.

Regardless of why the extension has been made, unless there are direct procurement plans in place, we can’t supply during this first wave unless we participate in this tender. To be able to confidently tender, one would assume that we would have to have reached the TT milestone, which would mean news before this time next week, or we’re not in the first wave?

From what I understand, there's virtually no chance of Affimers being used with a vaccine - that would involve Affimers being introduced into the body which is totally untested and a world apart from using them in test assays. It would presumably carry all the same hurdles that the therapeutic use case (for treating infected patients by binding to the virus spikes) presents and we know that is a long term play. It would be a completely novel approach with no historic data to draw on, so it would take years to get through the clinical trials (essentially following a process akin to the cancer therapy, which has already advanced through a number of pre-clinical trials).

I do think we're in for a surprise product announcement (AS has suggested as much), but it seems that's more likely to be in the diagnostics space rather than a vaccine or therapeutics.

17 current vacancies! Isn't that about a 50% increase in the Manchester workforce?

Knowing

Paranoidal Avactivity

Thought there was an Interesting additional word in this week’s tweets from the company - the word is ‘fully’

“We continue to make very good progress with a rapid antigen test and with the laboratory based mass spectrometry test. We are preparing for the first clinical evaluation of the rapid antigen test and will update the market fully when that study begins.”

We normally just get “update the market” but the addition of the word “fully” suggests to me that we can expect a comprehensive update on everything about the LFT very soon - not just the study starting, but progress with manufacturing scale up, commercials and expected launch date etc.

We may get other updates before then on the other products in development, but I now think the LFT news will all arrive in one mega RNS.

Al also teased us with the possibility of additional ‘undisclosed’ Covid products at the AGM, which presumably could lead to a wild card announcement at any time.

Just some musings in the absence of anything else to go on.

OK, have it your way Cooper - there are some people on here that have been invested since the Vialogy days, so we've been around the block and pay attention to what's going on. Some of us have also developed a very detailed understanding of how the financial dynamics of the business have been evolving and may even have modelled projections of our own that show eye-watering potential for future revenue growth which, coupled with the huge operational gearing, suggest that this company is poised to become a money generating machine in the coming months / years.

HOWEVER, that does not mean that we are not free to point out things that we believe have been poorly communicated or inadequately explained - it's what these forums are for.

PS even a cursory glance at my posting history would clearly demonstrate that I have no hint of an affiliation with Twix, but I guess you didn't bother looking before making that wild assertion.

Cooper, I have no desire to enter your personal spat with Twix, but this is a discussion forum not an appreciation society - it's OK to have a positive outlook about the totality of this company as an investment choice, while questioning certain aspects of their performance and the quality of their communications. That's what these boards are for and we can all then make an informed choice about our investments. You don't have to agree with everything a company does to regard it as a good investment.

I agree that the update today was disappointing - not particularly because of the actual numbers, but because they are out of line with what we have been told for the past 6 months and especially that the core business was remaining 'incredibly resilient'. That set a clear expectation in everyone's mind that the additional revenue streams from new products, the Illumina product launch and Covid etc. were all incremental revenue on top of the previous forecasts, whereas the reality is that it has been largely substitutional year to date. If the narrative throughout the period had been different (core business has been hit, but we're bringing on line other income streams to fill the gap), then today's update would have been a strong validation of that story and good news in the context that every business is currently operating under.

I still can't get my head around the limited capacity for Covid testing - Lyn said that they were in talks with the Govt over moonshot, but surely that can't be on the basis of packets of 10,000/month (which is 333 per day)? Surely he can't be going into a conversation about increasing national capacity from 360,000 per day currently to millions per day with an opening gambit of 'packets of 333'? Anything less than thousands (probably tens of thousands) per day simply wouldn't register on the radar.

One thing we do know about Lyn is that he always wants to be certain that he can hit his numbers - maybe he doesn't have the stomach for going large? The only other explanation I can think of is that further capacity expansion is aligned with contract wins, which would make some sense, but it would be good to hear if that's the case.

Interesting find - shift pattern suggests they are literally working around the clock