Company News

RM Plc and a Questionable Share Consolidation

RM, a provider of educational products and services to schools, has been through some troubled times of late. Revenue has been falling and is forecast to fall further after they made the courageous, if long overdue, decision to stop producing PCs. In addition there have been a number of changes among the directors in the last couple of years. But the company has been generating cash, and now has a healthy cash balance (£63m in the last accounts) so it has decided ...

Pets at Home -one for pet lovers?

Pets at Home Group is one of the few upcoming IPOs that will be open to retail investors. A "pre-announcement" that gives some details of the float has already been issued. Financial information so far supplied is not detailed but revenue was £598 last year from 369 retail stores and 246 small animal veterinary surgeries. The retail stores often include in-store grooming salons (for pets of course, not their owners). The business is currently owned by KKR and they seemed to have ...

ShareSoc Companies Seminar Report 2014-02-20

  This a very brief note on the ShareSoc Companies Seminar last night. The companies presenting were NewRiver Retail, Ilika, DotDigital and IS Solutions. They were all interesting companies in different ways, and there is nothing better than hearing from the horse's mouth what the management have to say about their own businesses. Note that ShareSoc is now running these seminars regularly so as to enable private investors to learn more about individual companies. The format enables you to hear directly from the senior ...

Essar Energy and Camkids – spot the connection

Essar Energy (ESSR) is a FTSE-250 Indian oil company where minority shareholders are none too happy about a proposal from the majority owners (the Ruia family) to make a bid for the company at 70p. It floated at 420p in 2010 on the London Stock Exchange and joined the FTSE-100, but it has shown substantial losses in the last two years. Standard Life has described the move as "cynical opportunism" and seem to believe that the offer undervalues the future prospects ...

Rolls Royce – Jam tomorrow after all

Rolls Royce announced their full year results today and they were very good - underlying profit before tax up 23% and revenue up 27%. The order book also grew by 19%. But the share price promptly dropped by 15% in morning trading. The reason for the fall was simply that the adjusted earning were below expectations, and there were some very negative comments from the CEO about the expectations for 2014. To quote: "we expect a pause in our revenue and profit ...

Barclays – Who benefits?

Barclays Bank announced their final results yesterday. The results did not match expectations and the shares fell 4% on the day. The national media led with the story that the company had still increased the bonus pool even so, and that the company now pays out more in bonuses than it pays in dividends to shareholders. The CEO, Antony Jenkins,  gave the usual excuse for the high pay levels - that they need to compete on the international scene for top class ...

Hargreaves Lansdown backs down

On the 17th January ShareSoc issued a press release which pointed out that the new charges announced by Hargreaves Lansdown would mean that some investors might face a doubling of costs. See the text of the press release here: Hargreaves Lansdown Double Charges Investors. The particular problem was that anyone holding a mixture of investment trusts, funds and direct shares in a SIPP would now have two separate "caps" on overall charges. ShareSoc was no doubt not the only body that raised ...

Blinkx – more market abuse in AIM stocks?

The Blinkx share price reached a peak of 218p on the 6th January, but yesterday (30/1/2014), it closed down 33%. At one point it was as low as 90p. This followed the publication of a blog post by Benjamin Edelman under the heading "The Darker Side of Blinkx" which attacked various aspects of the company's operations. Blinkx sells advertising linked to on-line videos, supported by a video search engine (it originally spun out of Autonomy). Edelman, who is an associate professor at ...

Fundsmith progress and new Emerging Markets Trust

Fundsmith have recently published their results for the year ending December 2013. ShareSoc reviewed this fund in our November 2012 newsletter so it's interesting to review their progress since then and whether they have managed to keep up their initial superior performance. Led my well known investor Terry Smith, Fundsmith has a very specific style and these are the promises they make to investors: No performance fees, No initial fees, No redemption fees, No overtrading, No leverage, No shorting, No hedging, No ...

Silverdell Shareholder Meeting Report

There was a meeting attended by about 20 Silverdell shareholders in Beckenham on the 20th January. A report of the meeting is present here: www.sharesoc.org/Silverdell_Shareholder_Meeting_Report.pdfIt covered what was known about the events at this AIM company, where the shares were suspended out of the blue, and delisted 6 months later with not much communication to shareholders in the meantime. The company has announced that the shares are worthless. Also discussed was what actions shareholders might take at this point in time and ...