Very hairy: this company was going down the toilet even before covid; it's now a wreck - and even better, it's enormously exposed to Chinese solar. BK isn't off the cards and the upside may not even be that great. Chart is back to Jan 2017. Singulus from Germany #SNG.DE Image
It's a German maker of high end capital goods for solar, semi and life sciences: glass and wafer deposition / polishing, that kind of area.

How it started:

Revenues & Ebit
2017: €91m & -€1.2m
2018: €127m & +€6.8M
2019: €79M & -€8.0M
And in all it's glory, here's how it's going:

Revenues in 9M20 YTD a third of an already bad 2019. Goes from breakeven to -€20M loss and even achieves a negative gross margin, quite the achievement. Image
What happened? Orders fell off a cliff and kept going Image
A little over half the business is Solar - capital goods to China and it's mainly into CNBM a Chinese solar giant who are also a shareholder in Singulus (yes it does keep getting better) Image
There's €12.5M of unrestricted cash on the balance sheet right now and "€66.8M of short-term debt". Market cap is €37M. The 9M report also contains plenty of ominous warnings about existence and needing the cash to come through the door. Image
Here's one: basically a big going concern warning. Image
Here's where things get a little better. Remember this is German. The German word for debt is "shuld" and it also means blame, guilt, fault, liability and trespasses; they tot up every penny they owe anywhere and call it debt - this is what we're dealing with. Actual debt: €16M Image
Sure they're paying up the wazoo for it but it's not €66M. Now here's the cashflow. Quite a bit better than I'd expected. Image
Now, the bond needs refinancing next year, this is in part the prompt for the warning. Image
But the bond market is so over it: it's at 94 (and as @RodriGo_ethe has pointed out, you could go long the equity and short the debt here) Image
What gives? What gives is that CNBM are back in town.

Q1 orders: Image
Q2: another €3M or so Image
Q3 to end of September: another €4M Image
And since period end.. they're pouring in

And note how semiconductor is coming back, this looks more broadly based than just the solar. Image
I think semi capex spending generally looks set for a very strong 2021 but it's almost certainly not enough to carry the company. The question is what kind of upside there is here. In 2018 the market was willing to pay 1.2-1.3x EV/sales when it was growing and turning profitable
But at an EV of ~€40M, it's now 4x less than then, with an order backlog at end Sept of €75M - and in reality, it's perhaps even a bit closer to what it was the glory days running into 2018 than this figure suggests. It might be enough here to hang around and see what happens Image

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More from @hareng_rouge

1 Jan
Resolution: no drink and no showing how I read accounts, so grab a bottle of absinthe and let's look at $TRIT

A mysterious stranger appears from a foreign land.

"Play me the music of your people", you ask

It's like nothing you've ever heard but it's everything you've ever felt Image
You fix the stranger in your gaze

"Where did the cash go?" Image
"Onto the balance sheet, it is the custom of my people" Image
Read 17 tweets
5 Oct 20
There's a thread by @Mitch198509 about $NFIN, a SPAC for a trade finance platform. It uses blockchain and at that point in the presentation I stopped. Forget it, of course.

But I read it again, then the proxy, then I put it in front of a trade finance lawyer. Could be something
Those numbers are projections I pulled from the proxy. Earn-outs on either share price X by certain dates, or 90% of the above EBITDA being achieved.

Doesn't need to get a $NCNO to $MKTX multiple to work from here but we can dream.

HY20: Revenue $24M / Ebitda: $17M / Net $14M
What they do in 1 tweet:

Platform for trade finance. TF is slow, paper-intensive, expensive and inaccessible for little fish: company says $1.5T unmet need with 60% of requests refused. Triterras (the biz NFIN is SPACing) brings KYC pre-qualified borrowers and lenders together.
Read 12 tweets
29 Sep 20
Satisfyingly, 's 1996 annual report looks like the intro credits to Saved By The Bell.

It's also how far back I had to go to find when their R&D spending matches what 's is today: 24 years Image
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Intel spends in a year what it takes AMD almost a decade to afford Image
Read 4 tweets
20 Sep 20
Just noticed an oddity about the stocks I hold. Is there a good explanation for this? Image
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Results of this study are in and it turns out companies are keen on being at the front of the phone book Image
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18 Sep 20
Simplifying bigly, Trackwise #TWD may still be cheap despite the +50% rise on the news below (£3M FY19 revs + £6.5M post period acquired revs = 4x sales, although not annualising in '20 at this rate)

A very big stretch but this reminds a me a little of Vicor , here's why.
If you've ever seen what lives behind the nose and beneath the cockpit of any modern passenger jet, it looks like this. This is the A320: 70s design and clearly this is not going to fly (yep) in UAVs or indeed be what you're going to see when you pop the hood or bonnet in an EV Image
TWD make these things below - flexible printed circuit boards. Actually, everyone makes them but everyone can only make length limited and circuit limited ones. Better than the mess of cable harnesses in the aircraft but still limited - by length, size, form and circuit number. Image
Read 7 tweets
16 Sep 20
Corero #CNS have sorted out their website now or at least the malware is a little more subtle - so here briefly is what they do and why I think this may be a pretty interesting UK GARP stock
Just the one tweet on what they do because, computers:

It's on-premises DDoS protection - Corero equipment (powered by $JNPR's MX - important) sits at the edge of the network, inspects and mitigates attacks.

Anything less than 10GB is dealt with locally. More, goes to cloud
Why they're interesting is essentially that there has been quite a sudden step change in their performance.
Read 8 tweets

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