Broker note on LEG this morning.18 Jul 2017 09:13
Legendary Investments (LEG.L, 0.14p) – Speculative Buy
The Board yesterday confirmed that one of its portfolio of companies, VirtualStock Holdings Limited (‘VS’), has completes strategic funding round with Notion Capital, a trading name of The Fund Incubator Limited. VS, has attracted an investment of £4.5m from this leading European B2B SaaS Venture Capital firm, in order to support its next phase of growth. The financing round values VS at £66m. VS's goal is to transform global B2B supply chains and marketplaces through its ability to seamlessly and rapidly connect systems together. VS's core platform (‘The Edge’) is already used by leading retailers including Tesco, John Lewis, Sainsbury's, Argos and Dixons ****hone to support their digital and omni-channel strategies. The Edge brings increased transparency and simplicity to a company's supply chain meaning customers can take advantage of the ever-increasing opportunities that an omni-channel environment presents. As well as the country's leading retailers, VS also counts the leading NHS Trusts amongst its clients; within this, it now operates in partnership with NHS Shared Business Services to incorporate The Edge into its systems is intended to help realise up to £1bn of annual savings through transforming the end-to-end procurement process.
Our View: Beaufort has written extensively about VirtualStock and the global opportunity its unique supply chain software brings. VS delivers an agile supply chain technology platform that allows its clients to quickly adapt to the challenges of digitisation without turning to traditional systems integration, thereby reducing cost and risk while accelerating operational benefits. VirtualStock has already demonstrated this in two very significant sectors from where it has already accumulated a highly impressive portfolio of ‘blue chip’ clients. Beaufort’s own valuation of VS, which presently stands at £240m, is much higher than that implied through Notion Capital’s strategic investment. But while that suggests Notion got itself an absolute bargain, its funding injection will ensure it has adequate financial resource to sustain its timely growth acceleration through enhancement of its range of client solutions, while expanding reach into new markets. Termed “the best possible partner for us” by VS’s CEO, Andrew Mills, this new relationship also offers access to the ‘Notion Platform’ which has been designed to support its portfolio businesses through a range of value added services. Legendary Investments’ holding in Virtualstock has been reduced from 7.1% to 6.8% as a result of this funding injection; simply valuing this participation on the basis of Notion’s own funding injection provides a 15% or so premium to LEG’s current market capitalisation. But in expectation of its participation in VS becoming more realistically val