Member Info for sweepydog2

The company is showing IMs holdings as: Ian McDonough (including family interests) 24,571,877 7.29%

The BT win was announced as an RNS Reach so the BoD thought it was worth less than £150K pa (if it was more than 10% of turnover it would have been a full blown RNS). But IM has always said "land and expand" so it could be worth a lot more in a couple of years.

An RNS is meant to cover the release of information that is price sensitive ie it is expected to have an effect on the share price. As a rule of thumb any news that impacts sales turnover by 10% or net profit by 5% would be price sensitive. RNS Reach covers deals that do not reach RNS standards but are nevertheless significant. Todays news was a trade release that was foreshadowed in the post results briefing given by IM two weeks ago. He also mentioned another Tata deal which was likely but that may be subject to privacy restrictions imposed by the customer.

EVS are a BIRD OEM and this is significant: https://evs.com/en/news/evs-strikes-gold-new-contract-major-sporting-event-2022

BIRD may have already claimed R&D tax credit relief. My understanding is that it utilises some of the losses to create repayments.

The best place to start if you want to know what's next are the briefings given by IM, SS and SW.
SS is always working several years ahead and significantly IM announce in the latest meeting that he was shifting his focus to the public Cloud which will facilitate almost limitless expansion.
You can see listen to the briefing (its about an hour with questions) and its free once you have signed in!
https://investormeetcompany.com/investor/meeting/final-results-for-the-year-ended-31-december-2020/presentation

During his presentation to shareholders IM was asked about the conversion of Tata clients (originally Tata said there were some 400 that they thought would benefit from using BIRD with a range of £50K - £150K for individual fees) and he said that a realistic number would be 50. 50 at £100K is £5M which at 90% margin is £4.5M. That added to existing turnover should mean that B/E will be this year possibly in Q3 and could be earlier if they pick up other significant customers. The problem for shareholders is that Tata is the customer and they have already made an RNS announcement about them so no conversion of a Tata client needs a further announcement.

IM said in his presentation in answer to a question that he thought 50 Tata customers converting would be a credible figue which implies £2.5M of tunover on what was previously said.

The 60% was in the bag at 31/12/2020. If they achieved the same percentage performance this year as last the turnover will be around £2M still well short of breakeven or profitability.

I didn't think BIRD would hit 28p before the results/presentation. Now I'm not so sure. The Sky interview, which at least proves Sky know about Sky Arabia I hope, gave the SP a push then there's the IABM interview with IM this afternoon. It is just possible that BIRD may shed the 0.25p or 0.50p rise and opt for the 25p or even 50p when IM reveals all on Wednesday. If I had them I'd be very short in AVID and Adobe.

On present metrics 50p would need a turnover of around £4.25M. There is clearly a lot of activity but its difficult to know what fell in 2020 and what falls in 2021. My guess is that the briefing will make it clear that BIRD is soaring so the 50p may become just a figure they passed early on in their flight.

Whilst scaleability would normally be an issue the tech here being Cloud based ab initio makes it a minor consideration. The key factors are turnover and margin. BIRD makes 90% on deals that are signed direct and 85% where there is an intermediary. They do not do hardware. So they are a cash generating machine if they win sales. IM has adopted an OEM strategy which means they do not have to deal with the end users and so have very low sales costs. Once they start a flow of bigger contracts the multiple is likely to rise from 40x and don't forget SBS wants his baby to be the accepted world standard. If BIRD can achieve that they will be the dominant market force for at least the next 10 years and maybe much longer - think IBM and the PC.

The figures are potentially so big most shareholders will be forced to have several banks because no individual bank likes having too large an amount on deposit from a single customer. At a turnover of £10M the SP should be around £1.50 a share assuming a multiple of 40 x.

Continuing low volume today. I think the first 2 transactions were actually purchases.

If you look at the Analysts Reports on the BIRD Investors page the regular Allenby reports certainly suggest things are moving compared with previous years. Given the A+E Inc extension, B*******g, US State Dept Extension etc. and the Tata links being swiftly adopted perhaps the outturn for 2020 may be around £2.5M turnover which would push the SP to around 30p. But then whatever is said about the current year needs to be added as well and that could be very substantial. So the MM is finding it hard to prise shares from the long term holders .

The latest figures estimate that the worldwide post production market is around US$19.75BN for 2021 and its growing at around 5% a year. Unfortunately they don't say what is included in "post production" but a side note says that North America and Europe are slow growing areas whereas China, the Far East and India are at the faster end. So Tata is good news again in that respect.

There are clearly competitors out there for BIRD but the question I ask myself is "are they offering a comparable product"? IM says in his recent interview that BIRD does 80 - 85% of the editing that AVID does. But BIRD does it in the Cloud so there is no massive shifting of data back and forth with the attendant cost and security issues. Perhaps it is the speed, security and cost savings that mark out BIRD and users like Tata from the others.

Yes, kash_ is spot on and the presentation is a must listen. They try to answer all of the questions asked and if they cannot they reply afterwards. In the past a transcript has been published which is helpful because there is so much information its possible to miss things that are important.

I certainly agree that the results and subsequent presentation should see further upwards progress on the SP and that progress to date should show up in the deferred revenue provision.

I'm not sure the present price movement would have happened without the Tata disclosure. In fact I think that given BIRDs history of promises not met the general market is pretty resistant to an upward rating if hard evidence is lacking.

Given the coverage here and elsewhere they didn't really have any choice. Major news but not disclosed BIRD doesn't look good no matter how much it is what the rules say. BIRD's basic problem is that sales through OEMs was not in the rules when they were written.

The really impressive thing is how quickly they have been able to embed BIRD into the Tata offering and roll it out to customers. Tata have the clout actually to transform BIRD into a global leader rather than the promise of becoming one. Looks like the shares are going to become the ones that no portfolio can be without.

To be strictly accurate I think the 400 were those customers which Tata had identified as highly likely to convert to using BIRD in the short term. It doesn't include their other customers or businesses they could now target with their BIRD supercharged service. There is lot of scope for expansion and Tata has the coverage and clout to do it quickly.