The story is as follows. Drum's REIT fell on hard times, did a placing, diluted and Drum's directors left.
New management brought in, main events are as below
Management have a successful history in the sector, successful rescues and trade sales. They want to IPO / Sale here
Meanwhile, Acuity's management appears to be recognised in the field and has built and sold companies before - namely, to Siemens
Given the scarcity of financial information available I'm going to concentrate here on Angus Forrest, the head of Drumz and 20% owner of Acuity to look at what he did in his prior two roles.
LinkedIn: He started / joined Tern PLC in August 2013
It tallies with contemporaneous reports from Tern: a re-org, a first investment. Note how he's already into tech.
By 2016 the value of the company has multipled 6x
Director dealing from the start of his tenure shows prices of 0.1p rising to sales at 0.9p at the time of his exit. I'll call that a 10x for cash.
Following that: Abal, which had previously been called Imaginitik. As you can see below and from the numbers if you link through to the report - the company has fallen on hard times: he comes in, steadies the ship and gets it sold
I took notes on a 10 minute September interview linked below: customers don't leave when they raise prices, he wants to sell or IPO within two to three years
Lastly, this. He comments in the spoken interview how small companies tend not to sell well - and in context with the below it makes clear he is in full playbook mode: now he's on the board, drive sales and growth, then exit
That's most of what I know: how much growth is from price, the % amount of "predominantly SaaS", IDK. Companies House shows balance sheets for Accuity, no gremlins; Forrest seems like a decent jockey and Accuity seems successful - and cheaply priced for the growth and optionality
And one last curious thing that I don't know how to interpret.
I'd already noticed the warrants were priced quite far out from the price but here we see management options suddenly extended to 10 years, from 3
It's the same date. What it means, why they've got it pinned and whether it's a coincidence, I have no idea.
Along with the launch of the enterprise-level product, new website has gone up. Channel 4 appears to be a new customer here.
It's almost as if the company is describing exactly what they're doing and how it's going. Contract wins starting to add up for #DRUM Drumz
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$RADA makes small tactical military radars. The recent sell off hasn't made it cheap but it has begun to bring it closer to GARP territory
It's a rare pure-play on a theme that's perhaps not yet widely appreciated and is hard to access directly but you can see it in the numbers
Here's where it trades on a forward sales multiple against some of the big diversified defence majors - has lost much of the premium and now sits a little off the top end. Brits bottom of the pile.
Same group of majors but here on forward EBITDA multiples and towards the bottom end excluding the UK companies.
Naive view but I think Hunting #HTG may be on its way back to Covid lows because it's orphaned on the wrong market and there's an information disconnect - if so, my guess is that it's pretty oversold here.
The company isn't a pure play but it's good enough to say it's very shale exposed, towards the completion side vs the drilling side of things.
Three year chart to around May 2021: HTG in green vs several US oil services ETFs - as you can see, they trade in lockstep.
Same chart but on a 2021 YTD basis and it starts diverging somewhere around mid summer.
IG Design #IGR was a ten bagger in the 5 years leading up to Covid. An update a fortnight ago dropped the shares by half and erased all the gains in the most recent five years. Knife catching and broken growth this soon is almost always a mistake but IG may be an exception here.
My basic premise with it is that the accounts are a complicated nightmare (CTRL+f for "adjust" is 232 hits in the last FY report) but most immediately, that this is right now a gross margin story - I think there are grounds to at least consider whether IG can be given a pass here
Unfortunately, it does mean walking through it so grab a.. (just no) so anyway, here's the rough idea: Pre-covid in white, M&A growth darling, 20% gross margins. Forget the op margin for now - I'm stripping out the adjustments that made adjusted whatever go up and to the right
Saw a one-line tweet the other day mentioning McColls #MCLS as one of 2 highest conviction names.
I think I see why: there's a metamorphosis happening underneath and reasonable path to PE and FCF multiples between 2-3 plus a growth narrative, all under that lovely grim exterior
Story is that they're shrinking. 1500+ stores 2 years back, to 1050 by the end of FY21
Also changing: culling small newsagent shops to focus towards larger, more profitable grocery-heavy stores. So far, so worthy - but the real interest is the transformation into Morrisons Daily
Company raised recently to accelerate a programme converting 350 stores into these Mini Morrisons. They're at 56 today, will be 350 by end FY22
Cost is £90K per shop, what they call "cash payback" is 2-3 years and so far they're providing pretty immediate LFL sales growth of 25%
What does Sneller see to get such sudden FOMO for the old zombie that is Iofina #IOF? If you recall the name, it should produce revulsion but a few things have changed and there's a chance it may be about to make some money.
IOF produces Iodine in the US via O&G brine. Iodine is a beneficiary of industrial recovery generally and covid specifically - the largest use is used as x-ray contrast which may benefit demand from catch up on delayed hospital treatment.
And because it's 2021, inevitably:
Production is trapped on the wrong side of the Pacific: the two major production centres are Japan and Chile - so you have the obvious logistics issues for both and potentially politics for the latter.
I think it's worth revisiting Aquis #AQX here in light of a couple of data points that have since come out.
There are three main parts to the co: a stock exchange (AQSE); a tech licencing biz and their multilateral trading facility (AQXE) - it's this last one I want to look at.
First is the RNS from earlier this month announcing their MTF (investopedia.com/terms/m/multil…) had achieved 6.2% market share. Across the €53.6B traded on AQXE in July, this came out to €1.7B a day.
Those 6.2% and €1.7B are quite significant numbers and I'll come back to them later
In the period since the beginning of 2018 market share has risen from 1.72% to that 6.2% above. Here's how that value traded looks.