Member Info for zugzwang

I think there won't be any further business with Rand

Next Firteen revenue: £171m Profit before tax: £24.2m Margin: 14.1% We can but dream

Looks like a bigish buyer coming in fairly aggressively. There could be any amount of news to push the price upwards so perhaps wanting to get in ahead of that. We may get a holding RNS at some stage.

At last they get round to informing shareholders about F&F

The whole purpose of PTCM is to make acquisitions. If they are not a public company they won't be able to do this because companies will not take on equity that they cannot sell when they wish to. The problem isn't the debt interest, though it would clearly be better if it was less. The problem is that the company is not profitable at present. The revenue for the last three halves has been stationary and given that Australia has been advancing that means the rest has gone backwards. Is it too much to expect a PBT of 10% of revenue?

The Bank of Morton is a good deal more accomodating. He has more of a vested interest in PTCM succeeding.

Isn't the fact that they haven't been profitable enough to refinance the loans with a proper bank. Costs have kept pace with any increase in revenue meaning that they haven't produced a genuine profit. The lack of profits depresses the SP which then prevents them making any sensible acquisitions. The Morton loans are a symptom of the problem rather than being the problem.

A buy out isn't the end game IMV. The whole strategy with PTCM was to make acquisitions with equity, which would dilute everyone. The only problem with this is the SP for reasons that we well know. If Morton is buying it is because he thinks it is cheap, but then he has thought that at a lot of prices above this.

Presumably someone has bought these 7m sells. I expect that they are all better informed than the rest of us.

...or perhaps not. If they had taken 100% they would have had to issue an RNS. If they had they would either have had to issue shares to buy 49%, or it would have been valueless and they would have written off their investment - so perhaps good news. There is clearly something going on though IMV.

Presumably an RNS tomorrow as they only own 51% of Thirteen.

Worth a bit less now.

The good thing is the mkt cap is only £13m so the company doesn't have to do much for us to be off to the races. The management are also lavishly 'incentivised' for that to happen. The fact is though that they have stagnated for a couple of years. If you take acquisitions out of the 2015 figures then there is little growth and Newgate UK has gone backwards. Needs some of these so called big names to perform.

About time that they announced the new plant is up and going.

I tend not to account for the effect on equity as it is a one off. Last year the Aussies made a £2m profit so the effect of exchange rate should be about £400k in a full year, plus another £100k for the increase in equity. I tend to look at the attributable profit, which was -£1.9m at the interims. If you take off discontinued operations and amortisation it reduces to a marginal loss. What I would like them to do is announce a profit after all costs for the year, which they did a couple of years ago. That would be nice and indicate a really good H2/16. I think the time for excuses and protracted calculations to show a profit have gone.

How do you calculate £800k to the bottom line from exchange rate movements?

The market expectation is for a PBT of £563k and is contained in the VSA research note which is on the GDP website. At least that is the official expectation.

There is a presentation hidden on their website; http://www.portacommunications.plc.uk/application/files/6014/6418/5022/Investor_Presentation_May_2016_.pdf

2 Sisters has a turnover of over £3bn is highly acquisitive. It probably has a marketing budget of about 5% of turnover. They won't say how much they expect to make but clearly it is significant.

http://www.prweek.com/article/1354662/2-sisters-food-group-hires-newgate-wide-ranging-comms-public-affairs-brief