Member Info for SquirtyFlower

Which is precisely why you should be buying now.....i.e because you can clearly see the share price doesn't include any valuation for the energy side of the business or for the production improvements at Vametco or for the Vanchem purchase.

My view is that the BoD should regard the share price fall over the last 6 months in exactly the same way it regarded the sharp rise the preceding 6 months i.e. ignore it as an irrelevance to what their real focus should be, namely growing the business. Once a BoD puts managing the share price ahead of growing the business it has lost the plot imho. Although recent events may bring this into doubt, good news (and especially unexpected good news) is the biggest enemy of the shorter so the BoD should keep their focus on this.

Completing all the Vametco upgrades and demonstrating consistent high production levels, closing the Vanchem deal, getting the Eskom tender bids in, closing out other BE bids, etc. should be the priority - plus, hopefully, a few good news surprises along the way - not trying to take on the shorters/MMs because its a waste of energy. If we can all see the share price is woefully undervalued then we can be sure that sooner or later someone with very deep pockets will also see this .... and at that point the shorters will be toast and those who dithered or lost confidence in the fundamentals will be nursing a few regrets.

Alpha, a few questions:

1) What is their view of the supply-deficit for vanadium, vanadium pricing over the next 5 years and its impact on the growth of the VRFB market?

2) What do they see as the biggest risks in growth of the VRFB market e.g. vanadium supply/pricing, regulatory, insufficient levels of market awareness/media coverage/key influencers, etc? This might give more direction to Vanitec to help in reducing the market adoption roadblocks.

3) What/where does Cellcube see its primary markets? Geographically and key industries.

Strongly suspect the loan of the shares is coming from Golden Summit. Why?

- it started soon after they came on board
- a short of 6m shares would be about 10% of their holding so easy enough to accommodate
- they bought in quite aggressively and the share price went up sharply. I suspect they want more shares but the price was getting too high so they would welcome a 6-9 month fall in the share price so they can accumulate again at lower prices.
- I struggle to see why other major LTHs such as YD would start loaning out shares to shorters just at the point where their years of patient support was being handsomely rewarded in the 50p share price.

My other likely candidates for loaning out would be other participants in the March 2018 placing, but my gut feel is that it's GS.

Excellent stuff, Pdub. Many thanks.

Interestingly the 4*50K sells within a minute at 12:23 made no difference to the quoted bid/ask and all the trades went through at the same price which was not at the bottom of the bid either. I imagine this probably left the shorters scratching their head as to why it got nowhere - not least because trade rate has dried up a lot over the past 2 hours - so they tried again a few minutes later with a 100K sell. Same overall result (or non-result for them) even though the trade price was marginally lower than before.

Wonder whether they'll try again or whether they are beginning to think the mood music has changed significantly here i.e. more evidence there's a major buyer out there happily absorbing their sells.

The Vanchem news, the 1Q production news, Ramaphosa getting re-elected comfortably, MN's recent comment on the number of inquiries BE is getting, and the latest updates from Jeff Radebe regarding the SA power market all add up to a very strong reversal of the tide against those trying to force the price down.

The 2019 production guidance is very, very postive:

- we already have 649mtV (actual 1Q19)
- if we achieved 270mtV (the best rate for 21 months and achieved in March) for the remaining 9 months, we'd produce another 2430mtV, making an annual total of 3079mtV.
- However, as stated in the RNS, there will be a 24 day production slowdown/shutdown in June/July. Assume therefore a loss of 250mtV as this period is marginally less than 1 month.
- this would bring 2019 production to 2829mtV......right in the range.

In other words, the company is expecting to maintain or beat the March record production rate for the rest of the year. This is superb news.

Also, in the good news category, we clearly have a stockpile of production to maintain sales through the shutdown/slowdown period (and, hopefully, when prices are higher again). The good news just gets better.

The answer is probably that making short-term money on the back of giving the share price of a hard-working, smart company in Africa a good kicking far outweighs any commitment they may claim towards achieving societal and environmental improvements. But perhaps I'm just an misguided old cynic and they really are different to pretty much every other snout-in-the-trough-what's-in-it-for-me hedge fund on the planet.

Then I woke up from dreamland......

A good summary of the past year or so's RNS. You may be right they were motivated by the debt facility possibilities, though I still think it is short-term opportunism for the reasons I posted this morning (albeit, as we both suggest, a bit odd they'd latch on to BMN when there appear to be better targets out there) However, if the motivation was expectation of the need to raise debt which could then be exploited by them and the lenders, I hope they got a nasty shock with the purchase of Vanchem using cash flows with minimal, and perhaps even no (if V prices increase again), recourse to debt.

I am struggling to see what BMO have/are bringing to the party so far. The Vanchem purchase doesn't appear like they needed to be brought on-board given it's largely being financed from cash and, even if it needs a little debt, when FM did such an amazing job financing what appeared to be a more challenging deal with Vametco (and in quickly seeing the back of other financing necessities such as the bridging loan and Atlas in the past). Perhaps they are needed for the BE side of things....or perhaps there is something else even bigger being worked. Now that could be really good as I'd be very confident of FM playing a blinder for the benefit of LTHs in such circumstances given his strong track record.

Alan - having registered yesterday, you seem to have spammed the same question to several boards on here. In fact all of your posts have been a moan about II. Would I be right in thinking you work for a competitor and have come on here at the weekend (when admin are quiet) trying to poach customers?

For me, as I average two or more trades per month then the new II charges are cheaper than the old ones so I gain from them.

Herbalife (Herbalife Nutrition) is a US company quoted on the nasdaq. There was a huge and very public shorting battle that was conducted a couple of years ago between several high profile fund managers. Lots written on it and it was all over the US financial media for months. Probably the most pertinent point is that the shorts closed in 2017 and by the end of 2018 the company was trading at all time high prices and, to my mind, I can't see any reason why BMN won't also soon be trading at all time high prices.

Agreed, Pdub, this was probably opportunistic. Assuming they started around the end of 2018, there were several reasons they'd have thought BMN a good target:

- share price had risen 4-fold since April 2018 so due some sort of pull-back which they could exacerbate by shorting

- weakening V price (as you say). Possibly only a temporary weakening, but not their problem if they only have a short-term goal here

- a company that had missed production targets for engineering and labour relations issues, so possibly could make a working assumption there may still be these issues in 2019

- a company operating in a country facing an impeding election and where the ruling party is under pressure and the international investment community is still very much 'jury out' on whether things can be turned round.

I don't know why this outfit don't have other UK listed targets and they picked on BMN alone, but if you look at it with the above in mind you can (sort of) see why they would have seen us as a target 6 months ago.

It is also interesting to speculate where they loaned the shares from in order to short. I'd be a bit surprised if it was one of our major LTH holders such as YD (after all, why do so after all this time and trash what was becoming a real winner for them?). No, I may be barking up the wrong tree but my money would be on our II arrival at the end of 2018....step forward Golden Summit who possibly decided that their stake-building was getting quite expensive and might welcome a fall in the share price. I also note BMO came on-board around then too, but as they don't appear to have a holding to loan then I don't see them as the guilty party (though their arrival may have been another factor alerting our shorter to BMN as a target).

On the positive side....even if it's been irritating watching the share price fall, it's also quite comforting to see that our one small company is getting investment attention from all over the world now when in the 2p days all it could attract was some very wise PIs who could see the potential (smug smile from yours truly) and a bunch of city spivs the most notorious of which is now bust and some of its employees facing criminal charges.

In the end though, the basic facts are that BMN remains an outstanding investment opportunity. Strong a growing revenue and profits, growing production, no debt, strong cash flows able to support major purchases like Vanchem, and an outstanding management team with a clear and compelling vision and the skills and determination to deliver it. 40p will be back here soon enough and still think we'll see £1 before this year is out, so much to look forward to.

A few observations on the latest SPA report:

1) Good to see the increased price target. Overall a very positive analysis based on realistic assumptions.

2) People can quibble with the V price expectations but, in the end, they are just an assumption which seems reasonable given today's price. Reality may prove it different, but none of us know at the moment.

3) Much more interesting, the report confidently Mokopane production will be on-stream in 2021. This backs up the recent RNS and reinforces the notion that the company is confident of mining approval in the near future. Very good news.

4) Not sure I understand the Vanadium sales line in the table on page 1. This lists sales in kg, but think this is a typo and should be mtV. More significantly it projects 2019 sales as being 3096 mtV for Vametco and Vanchem. This seem too low given Vanchem is 960 mtV. Initially I thought it must just be a Vametco target, but I see they've lumped all the Vanchem costs (negative cash flow) into 2019 so it seems very unfair to whack the numbers with all the Vanchem costs but give no credit for the sales. Therefore I strongly suspect we'll do a lot better in 2019 than they project (nearer to the 2020 sales numbers which do appear to include Vanchem).

5) That said, having absorbed this negative cash flow in 2019, the cash flow numbers for 2020 and beyond look absolutely superb. Stick that up your rear end doubters!

6) Good to see some detailed analysis of vanadium market in the future - potential competition and newbies coming on-stream, possible vanadium substitutes and their potential (or lack of it!).

Darryl - the concern isn't about the ANC winning as this hasn't been in doubt. The issue is the size of the vote and the latest estimates are around 56% as per your post. This would be the ANC's worst performance since the end of apartheid and will mean Ramaphosa is under more pressure from hardliners in his party to go further/faster than he'd like in some reforms (for example, trying to push him more towards expropriation in land reform). The more time he has to spend on fighting off ANC-internal politics the more the international investment community will doubt what investment friendly measures will be achieved.

The good news is that the hardline hard-left EFF appear to have done a lot worse than forecast with under 10% of the vote.

It's not illogical because much of the wider market is lazy and so they use whatever fundamentals info they find on sites such as MorningStar and ThisIsMoney - and this is our 2017 numbers (....and don't get me started on the data on this LSE site which actually has the 2015 numbers as the latest ones.....just embarrassingly poor). Once the main sites get the 2018 data loaded then BMN will appear a lot more promising when your average lazy punter runs their share screener to determine which random company they will chuck their money at next.

Let's just draw a line under the stuff that's irrelevant to Bushveld. There's better uses of everyone's time on a weekend.

Amxdd - thanks for your reply to my earlier comment. The snippets you posted from the PH assessment were interesting. I suspect they are understating BMN's potential (especially since Wednesday) but, as I said earlier, in the end it is just one opinion versus another and time will be the judge. The important thing is to see the assumptions and factors included/excluded and use that as a basis for evaluating BMN and potential price targets (and comparing with other broker assessments of similar data).

There are 2 possible explanations for this:

1) They have simply restated their previous target without doing any analysis of the Vanchem acquisition.
2) They have analysed the Vanchem acquisition and concluded it has zero value for shareholders.

Given the restatement appeared so soon after the acquisition I suspect the answer is 1, but it would be helpful if you have seen an updated analysis and can post/summarise their reasons for attributing zero value.

In the end, however, it makes not a jot of difference what they think. It's just an opinion and it's no more or less valid than my dog's opinion on the price target.

MR - think you may have the wrong target there. If you read back through Mikinaman's posts then you will see he has always been supportive of BMN and regularly taken a pop at the trolls. Furthermore, you will also see that he is a friend/colleague of Pdub.

There is a troll called mikemm who has been posting tripe on here recently....suspect that's who you were thinking of.

BBN - as always, a series of particularly insightful, clear and helpful posts over the past few days. Too many people focusing on the day-to-day share price when the true measures of the strength of their investment are the revenue, profit, cash-flow, debt levels and growth rate of the company they are investing in.....and on all these measures BMN is a fantastic investment in all of the short, medium and long-term and so current and potential investors should have complete confidence they will be rewarded as a result.

faramog - I rather think HaleSpur was using irony to ridicule howler and to indicate his/her strong support for what FM/BE are doing. Perhaps you should re-read the post in that context.