Equals Trading, Bango Results, Finablr Suspension, Baronsmead VCT and Closing the Stock Market

As share prices of almost every share on the market collapses, should all trading be suspended? The argument for this is that as the impact of the coronavirus on the economy is not certain, although it looks more dire every day, shares cannot be valued with any certainty. Indeed there seems to be no hiding place as there never is in a bear market – almost all share prices have fallen. The editor of the FT thinks the market should not be closed and I agree with her. Closing the market is very prejudicial to private shareholders, particularly those who absolutely need to move into cash even if it means some sell into an unrealistic market – but that is their choice. If the market closes you have no choice. If there was to be a closure, it should only be for a few days as at the start of World War II.

I have been trend following in the market as I have mentioned before but it has proved difficult to keep up in the last few days. At least brokers’ systems seem to be robust this time around.

The major sectors affected by the virus, or soon will be, are hospitality businesses, hotels, pubs, entertainment venues and airlines. One symptom is that I just cancelled our holiday in June as I am supposed to be hibernating for 12 weeks according to the Prime Minister and I doubt the epidemic will have passed by June. But you can see that there will be many staff lay-offs in such businesses and airlines are already asking to be bailed out by the Government because if airplanes don’t fly they cannot cover their aircraft lease costs.

Meanwhile the virus is causing businesses to get their staff to work from home, including one of my brokers. Payment company Equals Group (EQLS) issued a statement this morning giving their response to the virus and a trading update. They say they have 50% of their staff working remotely in shifts and can move to 100% when required. As regards trading, group revenues to the end of February were up 33% but there has been a marked slowdown in travel cash and retail card revenues in the last week due to the adverse impact on travel. But corporate revenues are still robust so far and account for the majority of revenues. Clearly the business will be impacted to some extent so they are cutting costs to conserve cash. The share price had anticipated this and had already fallen a long way in previous days and weeks – it fell again today.

Another company in the payments sector is Finablr (FIN) which announced yesterday that the shares were suspended. The company suggests that problems with liquidity are making it difficult to manage the business. They have also discovered some cheques dating back to before their IPO which have been used as security for the benefit of third parties – a small matter of $100 million is involved! The CEO has resigned and the board is looking for a new one. This company was founded by B.R.Shetty who also founded NMC Health and whose accounting and financing arrangements are also under scrutiny. It looks like Finablr is yet another financial disaster I have managed to avoid to look on the bright side. I would not bet on shareholders recovering anything. Temporary suspensions very frequently turn into permanent ones.

Another company that operates in the mobile commerce and payment sector is Bango (BGO) who issued their final results today. Group revenue was up 41% and they say “Adjusted EBITDA” for the year was a positive £0.45 million. However cash declined because of the large expenditure on intangible assets and there was still an overall financial loss. They expect the “payments business to continue to grow exponentially” and they forecast the coronavirus to have a positive impact on End User Spend as from experience they see consumer spending rise during “stay-at-home” periods such as Ramadan and Christmas. The share price rose slightly today by the time of writing this note, but investors are still unsure about the future of the company it seems. Investors are either taking their money off the table altogether or moving out of businesses likely to be impacted by self-isolation and quarantining and this is having a very wide impact.

My portfolio is now over 25% in cash which is very unusual but I am picking up the odd few shares in companies where the panic seems overdone – in none of the sectors likely to be affected that are mentioned above though.

One of the few companies I hold whose share price rose in the last 2 days has been Ocado (OCDO) as the popularity of on-line ordering and delivery rises. Getting delivery slots with them is now difficult for customers and other supermarkets are having similar problems and when you do get a delivery a lot of items are missing. There is clearly some panic buying going on for certain items which may subside if logistics turns out not to be a major problem after all. But surely all the workers who pack and delivery from supermarkets are going to be affected if the virus becomes rampant, even if they are in the younger and healthier group.

I mentioned some issues at the Baronsmead Venture Trust (BVT) AGM in a previous blog post (see https://roliscon.blog/2020/02/27/venture-capital-trusts-the-baronsmead-vct-agm-and-political-turmoil/). I wrote to the Chairman of the company, Peter Lawrence, after the meeting and have received a response. He confirms that the chart of returns in the last ten years in the Annual Report on page 3 was wrong. It showed a decline in NAV Total Return in 2018 when there was in fact an increase and the 2019 point was also wrong– a corrected graphic is below.

Baronsmead Venture Trust Corrected Chart 2020--03-17

It always surprises me that there are so many errors in Annual Reports that shareholders find easy to spot when the directors have not. This seems to be a particular problem in VCTs – perhaps too many jobs and not enough time allocated to each role with some VCT board directors considering their directorship a sinecure that requires little thought or effort. I suspect those are the problems. Perhaps they need reminding to read the Annual Report in detail before approving it!

Mr Lawrence rejected my complaint about the lack of time allocated to public questions at the AGM Meeting (only 15 minutes) and also rejected my complaint about the length of time he has been on the board which is contrary to the UK Corporate Governance Code. I will send him a stiff reply. To my mind this looks like one of those VCTs where a revolution is long overdue. It needs a fresh board and a good examination of the investment policy, the fund manager and the fees paid to the manager.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

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Intercede AGM and Tech Stock Valuations

Yesterday I attended the Annual General Meeting of Intercede Group Plc (IGP) at their offices in Lutterworth. I have held a very few shares in this company since 2010 in the hope that it would be able to turn its identity software solution into a profitable and growing business. Although they have some great major account customers, revenue has been static at around £10 million for the last 5 years and in 2017/18 they reported substantial losses. It always looked to me a typical example of a common failure in technology driven companies – great technology but inability to sell it. There was a revolution in the management in 2018 though with founder Richard Parris who was Executive Chairman departing in March 2018. Last year (year end March 2019), revenue was £10.1 million, a slight increase, and a small profit was reported after substantial reductions in costs.

New Chairman Chuck Pol introduced the board including the new CEO Klaas van der Leest and they have also appointed a new non-executive director, Rob Chandok. The other two non-executive directors have been there since 2002 and 2006 which is too long but they were not up for re-election.

There was no trading statement or other announcement on the day, so we went straight into questions. I asked about the “distractions” referred to on page 9 of the Annual Report and Klaas covered the management changes. It seems quite a number of staff left and new hires were made including sales staff, pre-sales and new developers, but the situation was now stable.

I asked about the status on development of channel partnerships which is what they are now clearly focusing on rather than direct sales. In response it was stated that 2 new channel managers had been appointed – one for the USA and one for the rest of the world. But it takes time to develop channel sales. The previous 4 offices have been cut to 2 in Lutterworth. Is it difficult to recruit staff bearing in mind the Lutterworth location? Not an issue it seems as remote working is now practical – Klaas lives in Surrey for example and visits the office a few days per week.

I also asked about the comment about development of a more standard variant of MyID (see page 6 of the Annual Report). Klaas said when he arrived the product had not been standardised – they were more selling a toolkit with “lots of arms and legs” so significant implementation expertise and effort was required. Comment: this explains why sales were not easy in the past because from my experience in the software industry this adds to costs substantially and slows sales.

I later asked whether the development effort put into before the management changes were made was of any use, but it seems that has been “mothballed” and they are concentrating on sales of MyID.

Another shareholder asked about the £1.45 million of receivables that are “past due” (see page 40) – have they been received? The answer from the CFO was in the main yes. The reason for the long payment times were because they are involved in large projects, often acting as sub-contractor. But he was somewhat evasive about whether they were now all collected and refused to disclose the current outstanding position. But he did say that with the type of clients they have, collection is not usually a problem.

I asked about the convertible loan note they have which is quite expensive – £4.7 million outstanding at 8% p.a. interest and repayable by December 2021. Could they be redeemed early? Answer was no but the board is considering that issue. As one shareholder commented, all they need to do is get the share price above the conversion price to remove the problem, although there would be some dilution as a result of course.

I chatted to Klaas after the formal meeting closed, and it’s good to have the company led by an experienced sales person. The changes he has been making look altogether positive but it seems to be taking some time to produce better results – but that might simply be the long lead times on major account sales and the time it takes to develop the partnerships. But it would have been preferable to have a trading statement of some kind at this meeting. I think we will have to wait and see on this company.

Technology Stock Valuations – Bango and Boku

Intercede is an example of a company which has minimal profits at present so valuing it is not easy. Based on broker’s forecasts of some increase in revenue this year it’s valued by the market at 1.4 times revenue approximately. That simply reflects the slow growth and the convertible debt issue. The large number of shares still held by Richard Parris may not help either. If the sales and profits can be ramped up, that may appear cheap in due course.

It’s interesting to compare this company with other technology stocks which have announced figures recently, which I also hold (none in a big way as they are all somewhat immature businesses to my mind with no proven profit or positive cash flow record).

Bango (BGO) issued interim results on the 17th September. It operates in the mobile phone payment and identity verification markets. It has forecast revenue for this year about the same as Intercede’s at £12 million and may break even after substantial historic losses. Its valuation is over £100 million, i.e. about 10 times revenue. The big difference from Intercede is that it is seen as a high growth business in terms of revenue! Another similar business is Boku (BOKU) which is also rapidly growing but historically loss making. They issued an interim statement on the 10th September. Revenue was up 39% and they appear to be on target to meet full year forecasts of revenue of $52 million. Their market cap valuation is £280 million at about 7 times revenue. Both companies have volatile share prices and tend to talk about EDITDA as profits are ephemeral.

You can see how important revenue growth is to technology stocks and why Intercede’s valuation is so low at present. If growth disappears as it did at Intercede then valuations quickly fall. You can see why it is necessary to look at the business dynamics, the management and the future prospects for the company to be able to understand the valuations.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

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Bango Loses Grant Thornton and Mello Event

On Friday I missed the Bango AGM (I am a very smaller holder of the shares) as I wanted to attend the last day of the Mello event – a brief report on that is below. There was a surprising vote against the reappointment of Grant Thornton as the auditors at Bango (BGO). This is very unusual. Most auditors can assume they will get back in unless they have really cocked up a previous audit.

So why did Grant Thornton (GT) lose the vote with 55% of shareholders against? Was it disgruntled investors who held Patisserie or Globo previously – both cases of massive frauds undiscovered in the GT audits of those firms? Or was it because of events at AssetCo, Nichols or the University of Salford where GT were censured?

None of those reasons. According to Bango Chairman David Sear it was because proxy advisor ISS recommended voting against on the basis that the company had paid GT marginally more for other work than for their audit of the company. That’s despite Mr Sear’s comments that the latest audit by GT was the toughest they had ever had and they were competitive on a re-tender.

I suspect some investors might prefer another auditor even so.

Mello Meeting

This event in Chiswick was certainly worth attending – mainly for the quality of the speakers and the opportunity to network with other investors. Leon Boros gave a very good presentation on why you should invest directly in equities rather than funds or bonds. We probably can’t all manage to achieve his feat of becoming a multi-millionaire solely from ISA investment via a very focused portfolio. He not only evaluates companies well, but also has learned how to trade shares to maximise profits and minimise losses. He recommended the book “The Art of Execution” by Lee Freeman-Shor and I would do so also – see my previous blog post here for a review: https://roliscon.blog/2018/02/18/the-art-of-execution-essential-reading-for-investors/ .

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

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