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Appetise

SPACS
Appetise are a food ordering website that are seeking to raise between 4.8 and 6.8 million dollars. While they are listing on the ASX, they are so far only located in London, and have no connection to Australia. In a trend that has been growing lately, they seem to have chosen to list in Australia purely due to its lower compliance regulations and associated costs.

Background



By numbers alone, Appetise looks like one of the worst value IPOs I have reviewed on this blog. To explain, let me give a few simple facts presented in Appetise’s own prospectus:



After starting in 2008, Appetise was acquired for only $230,000 in May 2016 by Long Hill, an American investment company. After acquiring the business, Longhill poured $2,260,000 into Appetise to improve the company's website and increase the number of restaurants on the platform. However, despite these investments, revenue decreased from $91,715 in FY16 to $49,172 in FY17. This IPO now values Long Hill’s stake at $9 million, with total market capitallization on listing between 13.8 and 15 million, more than 200 times their 2017 revenue.  If the IPO is successful, this will be a 261% return on investment over 18 months for Long Hill, despite no measurable improvement in Appetise’s performance. If you are getting flash backs of Dick Smith right now, you’re not the only one.


Management




When Long Hill bought Appetise they did the usual private equity thing of installing a completely new management team, getting rid of the original founder in the process. The newly appointed CEO, Konstantine Karampatsos, has had experience both setting up his own online business as well as a stint at Amazon, and the CFO Richard Hately has had a number of senior roles at both start-ups and established businesses. While the CEO and CFO both seem like logical choices, appointing such an experienced management team to a company of this size leads to some pretty ridiculous statistics.

Konstantine Karampatos will have an annual salary of $204,050, post listing, plus a bonus of $122,430. Richard Hately, the CFO, will have a salary of $195,888, and will receive a listing bonus of $81,620. The marketing director will receive a salary of $138,750, though no listing bonus. All up, this is an annual cost of over $700,000 for the three highest paid employees, for a company that had less than $50,000 in revenue last year. Even if Appetise’s FY17 revenue increased by 1000% in FY18, it would still not come close to covering the salary of its three most senior executives.

This is a perfect demonstration of why a public listing at such an early stage is a terrible idea. A $50,000 revenue company should be being run out of a garage or basement somewhere by a few dedicated founders on the smell of an oily rag, not burning through cash on highly paid executives.



This cost has real consequences too. Under their proposed allocation of funds, with a minimum $4.8 million raise, Appetise will spend $1.55 million on executive and head office expenses, vs only $2.15 million on marketing. Given that their primary goal over the next few years is to raise their profile, this seems like a ridiculous allocation of capital.

Product


As Appetise is currently only operating in England, the closest I could get to testing Apetise’s product was spending some time clicking through their website. Overall, it was a pretty underwhelming experience. There are three large tabs that block a significant part of the page, which makes scrolling through options difficult, and the colour scheme and overall design feels a little basic. 











On the positive side, they seem to have invested some time into making the mobile experience work well; if anything the site actually seems to work and look better on a mobile phone. It is also worth mentioning that while the prospectus mentions that the business has a national footprint on numerous occasions, their coverage in London is pretty minimal, and at this stage they seem to be focused solely on the city of Birmingham.



The company’s social media presence is similarly disappointing. The prospectus talks a lot about social media engagement through their loyalty scheme, where users can get credit by sharing Appetise on their social network but so far they have failed to get much traction in this area. The Appetise Facebook page seems to only post bad food puns, and each post gets around 2 to 7 likes on average





















(I also noticed that a company director and their marketing executive are two of their most common Facebook fans.) Compare this to Menulog’s page, an Australian food ordering and delivery service, where you’ll see content featuring available restaurants, slightly funnier puns, and as a result much higher engagement with customers. While Facebook posts might seem like a trivial thing to be hung up on in a company review, one of the key things that will affect Appetise’s success is how easily they can build an online following. The fact that so far they have demonstrated little nous in this area is definitely a cause for concern.

Market


Online food ordering is an industry with massive growth potential, and this is probably the main reason Long Hill felt they could get away with the prospectus valuation they have gone for. Appetise has a different model to the likes of Menulog or Deliveroo though, as Appetise does not take part in deliveries, instead, restaurants featured on the Appetise platform need to deliver the food themselves. The idea is this will allow them to scale more easily and not get bogged down with logistical complexities. While I don’t doubt this approach might work in the short term, (and Just Eat, a successful UK company with the same model as Appetise has proven that it can) in the long run an Uber Eats type model of flexible contractors, that can be sent wherever there is demand seems much more efficient. As websites like Uber Eats become more popular and economies of scale start to kick in, I feel there would be an incentive for restaurants to fire their delivery drivers and move from an Appetise type platform to an Uber Eats one.

Appetise makes the argument that their patform is currently cheaper, as Uber Eats charge delivery fees to customers, but just like with Uber, you would assume that these charges will eventually decrease as the site grows in popularity.

Verdict


Appetise’s response to a lot of what I’ve said here would be that the company is uniquely placed to experience explosive growth in the near future. They have a workable website platform, and their only major competitor in the UK Just Eat has demonstrated that there is money to be made in this market. While a $50,00 revenue company with a board of directors looks ridiculous now, if in 12 months’ time their revenue is closer to $1,000,000 no one will be complaining. The problem I have with this argument though is it requires a lot of faith with not much evidence. If Appetise is really uniquely placed to grow so quickly, why not hold off on the prospectus for a few months so they can demonstrate this? Appetise runs on a March end financial year, so their first half FY18 figures should be available now. Once again, the cynic in me thinks that if revenue was actually growing, these figures would be included in the prospectus. 

Even in a growing industry you need to be ahead of the curve and have a clear point of differentiation to succeed, and after reading the Appetise prospectus and looking over their website I simply don’t see this for Appetise. In one of the easier decisions I’ve had to make with this blog so far, I will not be investing in the Appetise IPO.



Registry Direct

SPACS

Overview


Registry Direct is a software business that provides share registry services to publicly listed and private companies. This includes keeping track of shareholders, facilitating the issuance of new capital, convening shareholder meetings and providing meeting minutes, share raising information and other required communications to shareholders. Registry Direct aims to provide low cost registry services to smaller privately-owned companies than have typically been ignored by the established share registry companies. The maximum raise is 6 million, with a post raise market cap of 20.5 million.

Founder


One of the main things I look at when evaluating the IPO’s of new companies is the strength of the Managing Director/CEO and how long they have been involved in the business. It was a key factor in why I invested in both Oliver’s and Bigtincan, and why I passed on Croplogic. Registry Direct’s founder is a guy called Steuart Roe. Steuart has been a key figure in the Australian investing world for years. He was involved in launching the first Exchange Traded Fund on the ASX back in 2001, and more recently was the manager of Aurora Funds Management from 2010 to 2014. It is his time at Aurora Funds Management that may potentially be a concern for some investors. Aurora Funds Management was created when three separate funds management companies were merged in 2010. One of the funds that was part of the merger was a fund founded by Steart called Sandringham Capital, and Steuart became the Managing Director of Aurora Funds management upon the new funds creation.

Without going too much into the details, the fund performed poorly, and Steuart Roe left the business in 2014. This article has some insight into the problems as does this hot copper thread where someone from registry direct actually turns up to give Steuart’s side of the story.

Having spent some time reading through all of this, it seems Aurora’s problems were caused by a few unlucky investment decisions rather than incompetence or mis-management. As a result, I don’t see how this should have any negative impact on how this IPO is evaluated. On the other hand, the experience and connections Steuart must have picked up in his time running investment funds seem to make him uniquely qualified to lead a successful share registry business. If you look at how quickly Registry Direct has grown since the business began in 2012 a lot of this has to be down to Steuart’s connections and experience enabling him to both design a product that fund managers and company owners would like, and have the connections to sell if effectively. Post listing Steuart will own just under 50% of Registry Direct’s stock and will continue in his current role as managing director. And all in all, I see his significant stock holdings and continued presence in the company as a significant bonus for this IPO.


Financials

Registry Direct are one of the few companies I’ve reviewed whose only pro forma adjustments actually reduce net profit.
Below are the unadjusted audited figures for the last three years:



Whereas the figures once pro forma adjustments have been made are here:


The rationale behind the reduction in revenue is that Registry Direct received consulting fees unrelated to the share registry business in 2015 and 2016 of $377,167 and $555,224 respectively that have been excluded from the pro forma figures. Interestingly enough, these fees came from Steuart’s old company Aurora Funds Management (Aurora Funds Management was renamed SIV Asset Management in 2016). While Steuart stepped down from his Managing Director position in 2014, he only resigned from the board of SIV Asset Management in June 2017. It would be interesting to hear what shareholders of SIV Asset Management think about the company shelling out over $900,000 to a company owned by one of its directors – but that is a topic for another day.

There can often be a real lag in revenue growth for software companies in early years, with every dollar of revenue dwarfed by massive investments in software development. That Registry Direct managed to grow its revenue so quickly is impressive, as is the fact the company managed to achieve profitability in 2015 and 2016, even if it was only due to the somewhat suspect related party consulting fees. 

Industry and strategy


The Share Registry market seems to be a relatively healthy industry, with good growth potential and profitability.  Computershare and Link, the two biggest companies in this sector in Australia grew their profits by 68% and 101% respectively over the last financial year. As mentioned at the start of this post, Registry Direct intends to diverge from these companies by providing cheaper registry services to a larger number of smaller privately-owned companies. The prospectus uses the below table to present Registry Direct’s proposed fee structure. 


The prospectus also indicates they intend to drive this growth by allowing accountants lawyers and other professionals to sell “white label” versions of the Registry Direct software. From an outside perspective at least, this makes a lot of sense. If Registry Direct can offer simplified registry services through a standard software package, increasing customer numbers by allowing accountants and other professionals to sell Registry Direct’s software on their behalf seems like a logical way to increase revenue without hiring a large salesforce. This strategy should be further buoyed by the Turnbull government’s recent legislation changes regarding crowdfunding in Australia. These changes make it much easier for unlisted companies to raise money from the public, which should result in a dramatic increase in the number of private companies looking for cheap registry services.
Despite how promising this all sounds, it should be noted that at the date of the Prospectus, Registry Direct only had 60 share registry clients and its two largest registry clients made up over $400,000 of the companies FY17 revenue. It seems that last year at least, Registry Direct was still operating more like a typical share registry business, providing tailored services to a smaller number of high paying customers. This pivot to a larger number of lower cost clients may be good in theory, but it is worth remembering that at this stage it is more of a plan than current business operations.

Valuation and Verdict

At only $648,000 of FY17 revenue vs a market cap of 20.5 million, this IPO is a little more expensive than I would prefer. Market cap divided by revenue is a troubling 31.7, vs 6.6 for Bigtincan, a Software IPO I invested in earlier this year. However, considering the company was only founded in 2012 and just how quickly revenue has grown over the last few years, I feel that this expensive price is at least somewhat justified.

Overall, the main thing that makes me willing to overlook this high valuation is how confident  I feel that Registry Direct will be successful. The company has demonstrated that it can grow revenue quickly, has recorded profitability in previous years, and is led by an impressively well connected and experienced Managing Director. What’s more, the company is operating in what seems to already be a relatively profitable industry that is likely to see an explosion of demand thanks to the Turnbull governments legislation changes. While I would be happier if the price was a little lower, for these reasons Registry Direct will be my fourth IPO investment since starting this blog.

Interview With Oliver’s MD Jason Gunn

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Oliver’s real food has had a volatile first couple of months on the ASX. While the share price initially soared to a high of 39 cents, market sentiment cooled when the company announced at the end of July that they would narrowly miss their FY17 earnings and revenue projections. Although missing prospectus projections is never a great look, Oliver’s management stated that this was mainly due to delays in opening new locations and one-off costs rather than lower sales, and have re-committed to meeting their FY18 forecast of $41.9M revenue and 2.37M NPAT.  At time of writing the share price is in the mid-twenties, still comfortably above the initial listing price, and Oliver’s have continued to provide market updates on the roll out of their new stores.

After such a dynamic first few months as a publicly listed company, I reached out to Oliver’s founder Jason Gunn, to see if he would answer some questions over email regarding the strategy of the business and how he felt things were travelling. Jason has kindly provided the below answers to six key questions of mine about the Oliver’s business and other related topics. Jason's answers give great insight into how the business is performing and his vision for Oliver's in the future. In a first for the IPO Review, I present my interview with Jason Gunn.

Oliver’s is obviously a business that has strong values and ideals, but now as a publicly listed company there is more pressure than ever on financial performance. How do you balance your desire to be ethical and responsible with the pressure and scrutiny of being a publicly listed company?

Jason Gunn:
-To me this is simple. To actually be a business we have to make a “Healthy profit” We have always had to do that, just to survive and attract investment. But it is not the main focus of the business; it is just something we have to do, just like we have to comply with the regulations and award rates of pay etc. Our number one goal is to make healthy food choices available to the travellers on the highways of Australia, focussing on providing a great product, in a very clean environment, with fantastic customer service, and we know that we have to do that profitably.

While there has been a revised guidance to your FY17 numbers, you have maintained your forecast for FY18. This now means you are forecasting revenue to grow from 20.436 Million to 41.909 million in one financial year. As an outsider, this seems like a hugely ambitious growth target. Are you able to explain why this is achievable?

Jason Gunn
-It is achievable for a couple of reasons. 1) We have bought back the 8 franchised stores. These stores were the best stores in our network, with significant turnover. As they are the highest turnover stores in the group, they are also the most profitable.  Just buying these stores back will add over $11m to our group TO, and a significant EDBITDA contribution. 2) We are opening another 11 stores in FY18. All of the stores we are opening are expected to be good performers in great locations. Plus, with all of this growth comes scale, and with scale comes efficiencies.

You have gone from being the founder of a small start-up to the Managing Director of a publicly listed company. How do you feel your role has changed over this time, and have you had any challenges adjusting to the realities of running a larger company?

Jason Gunn
-Oh yes, there has been quite a transition. But you know, I love my role, and I absolutely LOVE this business, so I feel that this is what I am destined to do. At the end of the day the role is largely about building a really strong team of motivated and experienced people that are all pulling in the same direction. I have that now, more than ever, and with the support of a very strong board, and an committed investor base, who believe in what we are doing and where we can take this business, I feel more confident and clearer than ever before.

While online reviews of Oliver’s restaurants are generally very positive, one of the criticisms that is made from time to time is that prices are too high. You have said repeatedly that your margins are not excessive and that your prices reflect the costs of providing healthy food. Are you able to provide some detail on the costs of providing fresh, healthy food at highway locations, and do you see potential for your prices to come down as the business grows and economies of scale kick in?

Jason Gunn
-Good question, but realistically no, they wont come down. In fact I do not believe that we are expensive, it just seems that way to some people. It seems that way to some people because we have all been conditioned to think that food is cheap, when it is not. What is cheap, is highly processed food that is full of artificial colouring, flavourings, and preservatives. This is not actually food. We should stop asking why REAL FOOD is so expensive, and start asking, “How can this cheap food be so cheap?” I think it is also worth mentioning, that being the worlds first certified organic fast food chain, we face many challenges around supply chain management that traditional fast food business’s do not have to overcome.

Unlike a lot of food chains, Oliver’s has decided not to pursue a franchise model and is in the process of buying back existing franchises. Are you able to comment on your reasons for avoiding the franchise model? Was this decision at all influenced by recent franchise problems at 7-11 and Dominos?

Jason Gunn
-No, nothing to do with 7-11 and Dominos’.  Like Ray Crock in the movie “The Founder” my first experience of franchising was a disappointing. We are a unique brand in that we have strict nutritional guidelines and we are out to set a new standard when it comes to the quality of the food and the way we do business. I am not saying that we wont have a degree of franchising again at some point in the future, but for now we want to have absolute control over the way our stores are run and retain the profitability in the listed entity, rather than sharing that with franchise partners.

The Oliver’s real food IPO eventually went ahead at a lower than expected price due to what I assume was limited interest from institutional investors, and recent proposed IPO’s from Craveable Brands and Sumo Salad have been cancelled in entirety for the same reason. Is the Australian market too conservative when it comes to new IPO’s from Australian companies? Are you able to comment on the reception you received when promoting the Olivier’s Real Food IPO?

Jason Gunn
-We received a fantastic reception from the institutions we met with, but the feeling was that we were over valuing the business. That said, we had significant applications from our customer base, so they did not think it was too expensive. But there were other factors affecting the overall market, and as a result, we lower the price to meet the institutional market, and thereby achieve our goal of listing.

Croplogic

SPACS
When I first saw the Croplogic IPO I was pretty excited. Lately ASX IPOs seem to have been an endless list of speculative mining startups and suspicious Chinese organizations, so its nice to see a company that seems genuinely innovative. Based on technology and crop management techniques developed by the New Zealand government research institute Plant & Food Research, the company is looking to revolutionize the agronomics sector with various technological and modelling-based solutions. This includes both patented electronic monitoring devices that provide live soil moisture levels from the field, as well as sophisticated modelling that allows farmers to predict moisture levels and show optimal times for watering and fertilizer application. The idea is that this technology will allow agronomists to spend less time driving from field to field taking samples, while giving farmers a higher level of service at the same time. The company has been around for five years, and has completed a few trials with large multinationals. While they claim these trials have been promising, they haven’t really amounted to much revenue as can be seen by the meagre profit and loss report.



Croplogic is seeking to raise up to 8 million, with an indicative market capitalization of $23.9 million based on a maximum subscription.

Strategy

One interesting things about Croplogic is that they have decided to grow by acquiring established agronomy businesses rather than organically (if you’ll excuse the pun.) This is based on the idea that the agricultural market is suspicious of new entrants and values existing relationships. Croplogic therefore intends to purchase traditional agronomics businesses then slowly introduce Croplogic’s various innovations to their customers. While I understand the thinking behind this (at a previous role I saw first-hand a European fertilizer company fail spectacularly in their expansion into Australia due to difficulties selling to suspicious Australian farmers), there are a few factors that make me worried this strategy won’t work. Post listing, Croplogic will have only around 8 million dollars with which to buy the very specific type of company they are looking for (they are specifically targeting potato agronomics companies) in the limited amount of time they have before shareholders start getting impatient. With such specific criteria and a limited amount of time, it seems a real risk they will be forced to pay above market prices for the first suitable company they find.

Croplogic’s most recent acquisition doesn’t really inspire confidence either. On the 28thof April 2017 Croplogic acquired a company called Proag services, an agricultural consulting business based in Washington state USA. Croplogic paid $1.4 Million AUD, with another $1.25 million to be paid over the next few years provided Proag’s revenue does not decline sharply. As a test case for Croplogics acquisition model, the Proag purchase does raise a few questions.

While in the financial year ending March 2016 the business made a profit of $140,000 AUD, in 2017 this had reduced to a loss of $24,650 (to make things simpler, I am using AUD for both the revenue and purchase price, despite Proag being an American company). This loss was caused mainly by small a decrease in revenue from 2.24 million to 2.14, and an increase in operating costs from $580,000 to $690,000. To be clear, the FY17 financial year ended before Croplogic bought the business, so these costs cannot be easily attributed to acquisition expenses. While there could potentially be other factors that explain the 2017 loss, 2.65 Million seems hugely unreasonable for a company that lost money last financial year, and even seems on the steep side if you just take the FY16 numbers into account.  Were Croplogic so desperate to secure an acquisition before the IPO that they ended up paying more than they should have for a struggling company? As an outsider it certainly looks like that.

Management

One of the things I look for in an IPO is strong founder with a real passion for the company. Bigtincan’s David Keane and Oliver’s Jason Gunn are two great examples of this. In addition to being good businessmen, both founders seem to have a real passion for their respective companies and expertise in their specific industries. You get the sense with both Jason and David that they have invested personally in their companies, and will stick by them for as long as it takes.
In contrast, the managing director of Croplogic Jamie Cairns has only been with Croplogic for just over a year and has a background in internet companies. The CFO James Jones has been with the company for even less time, and last worked at a private equity firm. While they both seem capable enough, they don’t seem to be experts in agronomics, and it’s hard to imagine either of them sticking around if they were offered a more lucrative role at a different company.
Powerhouse Ventures

The largest Croplogic shareholder is the ASX listed Powerhouse Ventures, owning both directly and through its subsidiaries roughly 20% of the Croplogic stock post listing. I like to think of Powerhouse Ventures a s New Zealand’s answer to Elrich Bachman from Sillicon Valley. The company invests in early stage New Zealand companies, most typically those that use technology developed in connection to New Zealand universities with the hope that these can eventually be sold later for a profit.

To put it mildly, Powerhouse Ventures has not been going that well lately. Listing originally for $1.07 in October 2016, the company now trades at around $0.55, following problems with management, higher than expected expenses, and difficulties with a number of start-up investments. 
This is a concern for any potential Croplogic investor, as one of Powerhouse Ventures easiest ways to lock in some profits and generate cash would be to offload their Croplogic shares. Considering the size of their stake in Croplogic, this would have disastrous effects on the Croplogic share price.

Summary

As you can probably guess if you’ve read this far, I will not be investing in Croplogic. While the shares are undeniably being sold for a pretty cheap price, their chances of success seem so small buying shares would feel more like getting a spin on a roulette wheel than a long-term investment. When you read through the prospectus, you get the feeling that the company is a weird miss-match of various technologies dreamt up in Kiwi research labs that some over-excited public servants felt would be a commercial success. Considering the minimal progress that has been made in the last five years, they probably should have stuck to writing journal articles. 

BigTinCan

SPACS
Overview

As someone working in business development, I’m used to being called into a room by an executive or manager for a presentation of the new sales tool that is going to reduce our admin/allow us to accurately forecast sales/provide quality leads. 9 times out of 10 it’s a bit of a let down. The tools are rarely demonstrated in a live environment, the data is often inaccurate, and the supposed insights with “machine learning” seems to be nothing more complex than a couple of if arguments in an excel cell. It is for this reason that I was a little sceptical when picking up the prospectus for Bigtincan, a content platform for sales people on mobile devices.

The Bigtincan hub allows companies to selectively push sales content to the mobiles and tablets of sales staff. The idea is that instead of sales people having to hunt through different emails or folders for the presentation or collateral that they need, all content can be accessed from the one hub, with both offline and online capabilities. Bigtincan is seeking to raise 26 million for a fully diluted market capitalisation of 52.34 million once all the various options and are taken into account.

Financials

BigTinCan is currently burning through a lot of money. The total loss in 2016 was nearly 8 million, and based on their own forecast figures they will lose another 5.2 milllion in 2017. In any other sector, trying to argue a company with these sorts of losses is worth over 50 million dollars would be ridiculous but in the tech space this is pretty standard. Any successful tech company you can think of lost huge amounts of money during their growth phase, sometimes for a long time. To use the most recent example, Snapchat’s market capitalisation post listing was around 29 billion dollars, despite losing over 500 million dollars last year.

Taking a closer look at the numbers, the extent of the loses seem more strategic than involuntary. In FY 2016, BigTinCan spent just under 9.5 million on product development and marketing, or 135% of their total revenue, and they plan to spend another 12 million in FY 2017. They could have easily reduced their loses by cutting back in these areas, but as every other tech company knows, the real key to success when you are selling software is scale. It costs nearly the same amount of money to sell a product to a million-people compared to a thousand, and you only get to sell to a million people if you have a great product. The key metric for any young software company is growth, and here Bigtincan does not disappoint. Total revenue was 5.17 million in 2016 and grew 35% to 7.04 million in 2016, with projected revenues of 9.7 million for FY2017.

The one potential problem I found regarding Bigtincan’s financials is whether there is enough available cash to sustain the future losses the business might make. BigTinCan will have 14.421 million dollars cash immediately after the IPO. Given their current and projected loses, there is a reasonable risk that they may need to refinance before they get into the black, which needs to be taken into account when deciding if purchasing these shares make sense.

Product

As someone who is often on the road presenting to customers in my day job, I get the appeal of the Bigtincan Hub. In sales, you are constantly searching through folders and emails for the right presentation or tool that suits the customer you are dealing with, and when you have to do it all on an Ipad it becomes even harder. A centralised hub that can deal with a range of different file types, allow commentary and collaboration, and let managers push files to different users has definite appeal.

What’s more, from all the research I have done, it seems the BigtinCan Hub has delivered as well. Most reviews they have received are pretty positive, and they have received some impressive testimonials from large customers.

Perhaps the most impressive write-up comes from Bowery Capital, a venture capitalist firm that publishes an exhaustive summary of all software tools for start-up sales organizations every year. In their latest piece, Bigtincan receives the best rating out of the 13 other companies in the “content sharing space.”

The only reservation I have with the Bigtincan hub is that it is targeted to address a very specific need. What happens if in a couple of years’ time, Google, Apple or Microsoft release something that can do everything that Bigtincan can do and more? Given the natural advantages these larger companies have, it would probably be the end of Bigtincan. Of course, the more palatable outcome is one of these companies deciding they want to acquire Bigtincan by buying out shareholders at a healthy premium over market price, so there is upside to this possibility as well.

Past court cases

Buried in the financial section of the prospectus is a small note that there were two court cases that had an impact on the Statutory profit and loss for the last two years. As investing in a company with a troubled legal history is an alarming prospect, I decided to do some digging to see if I could find out more about this.
The first court case was a dispute with an early director called David Ramsay. From what I can understand from Bigtinc an’s version of events, David Ramsey was given money to develop software for Bigtincan which he then used instead to develop an app for his own company. It appears Bigtincan won this case and Ramsey had to pay $300,000 in damages as a result. While Ramsey has tried to appeal this, it looks like his appeal to the high court was rejected. so it seems this chapter at least is closed.

The second case was with an American Software company called Artifex, which filled a lawsuit against Bigtincan over the use of technology that let users edit Microsoft office documents on their smart phone. Bigtincan reached a confidential settlement with Artifex over this matter, so we do not know the exact outcome, but as Bigtincan has continued to grow since then we can assume that whatever concessions were made did not have a major impact on the Bigtincan business.

I don’t really see any major cause for concern with either of these court cases. Given the potential money at stake, it seems inevitable that software companies get into squabbles about proprietary technology, and most successful tech companies have a story of some estranged director or other in their past, if only to give Aaron Sorkin and Ashton Kutcher material.

Price

Evaluating Bigtincan’s listing price is a more complex than for most companies, as I was unable to rely on a basic Price to Earnings ratio to get a feel for what would be reasonable. Instead, I decided to use price to revenue as an alternative as nearly all software companies list at a loss.

Based on these figures, the Bigtincan valuation seems pretty reasonable. Total revenue from the 2016 calendar year was 7.934 million vs a fully diluted market cap of 52.34 million, giving a Price to Revenue ration of 6.6. Linkedin’s initial listing was at a Price to Revenue ratio of 56 and Salesforce’s was around 11 (this was back in 2004 when internet companies were viewed with suspicion). Closer to home, Xero the New Zealand based accounting software company listed on the ASX in 2012 with a price to revenue ratio of 25.

In addition to comparing Bigtincan to other technology IPOs, I have modelled the next five years after 2017 to try and get an idea of where Bigtincan could end up, assigning different growth rates to their main revenue and expense areas.

Based on the assumptions I have made (and I accept that many will disagree with a lot of these) the company will have an EBITDA of 4.4 million in 2022. To me this is very compelling. I do not think I have been overly optimistic with the growth rates I have used, and you do not have to be Warren Buffett to know that a fast growing SaaS company earning 4.4 million dollars a year will be closer in market capitalisation to 150 million than 50 million.

Verdict

There are significant risks with this IPO. Bigtincan is still a young company operating in a competitive environment, and all it would take is a change in industry direction or a better product from a larger tech company to end their prospects completely. However, the potential upside if things go to plan is pretty substantial, and for me the price is low enough to justify getting involved.

The Fat Prophets Global Contrarian Fund

SPACS

 Overview
If you’ve heard of one hedge fund manager from the last ten years there is a good chance it’s Michael Burry. The eccentric investor made millions on his bets against the housing market during the Global Financial Crisis and was immortalized in the book and later film The Big Short. What is less well remembered about Burry’s story is that before the housing market blew up countless panicked investors withdrew their money from his fund, worried by Burry gambling so much money betting against a housing market in the middle of a boom. While Burry still made millions from his bet, it was less than it could have been, and the stress and frustration of the whole process led to him deciding to close his hedge fund.

Burry’s story highlights a fundamental issue with hedge funds: investors in hedge funds can withdraw their money whenever they like. It is often precisely when a hedge fund manager sees the most opportunity, for instance when the market is falling or in Burry’s case when a bubble is about to burst, that investors want their money back.

It is for this reason amongst others that Listed Investment Companies (LICs) have gained in popularity in Australia over the last decade or so. LICs are basically a hedge fund or managed portfolio that is publicly traded on the ASX. Unlike a hedge fund though, when investors decide to they want their money back from an LIC they simply sell their shares, which doesn’t reduce the money available to the manager of the LIC. This means that LIC managers are less beholden to their investors, and, the theory goes, therefore more able to concentrate on maximising returns.

The Fat Prophets Global Contrarian fund is the latest such LIC to list on the ASX, with their 33 million dollar IPO at $1.10 a share expected to close on the 10th of March. Fat Prophets was started in the year 2000 by their founder Angus Geddes as a subscription based investment advice and funds management company. Investors who sign up to their service are given access to a daily newsletter, as well as reports on certain stocks with buy and sell recommendations. Since inception the organisation has grown to over 75 employees and 25,000 subscribers, and now provides stock picks for a range of different markets and sectors. The Fat Prophets Global Contrarian fund is the first time Fat Prophets has branched out into the LIC world, and it will be run by Angus Geddes and his team using the same contrarian investing principals that has made Fat Prophets a success.

Pros

The Fat Prophets track record
Fat Prophets impressive growth over the last 16 years has been largely due to a record of stock picks which would be the envy of most fund managers. Since their inception in 2000 until the end of 2016, the annual return of an investor who followed all their Australian equities stock tips would have been 18.49%, against an All Ordinaries return of only 7.96%. They have had similarly impressive success in their other sectors. On the Fat Prophets website all of their past stock tips from 2006 to 2016 are publicly available, and reading these you get a good sense of the company and how they have achieved this level of success.

Each stock tip is thoughtfully written, with impressive amounts of detail about each company and its market outlook.  If you want to gain an understanding of their investing rationale and style, have a look at their buy recommendation for Qantas shares in August 2014.
                                                                               
The post goes to painstaking lengths to break down Qantas’s market position, their recent challenges, and why the Fat Prophets team felt the struggling airline could turn things around. Not only did the recommendation prove to be spot on, with the share price more than doubling over the next twelve months, but they were even correct about how it happened. They correctly predicted that a decrease in flight volumes along with the cost savings of Alan Joyce’s restructures would help bring the company back into profitability. Of course, not all their recommendations ended up being as spectacular as this one, but in all their tips they display a similar level of knowledge, discipline and intelligence. The opportunity of being able to get in on the ground floor with a team like this as they embark on a new venture is definitely an appealing prospect.

Minimal Restrictions
Reading through the prospectus, one of the things that jumps out at you is the loose rein Angus Geddes has given himself. While most LICs typically restrict themselves to certain sectors, areas or assets types, the prospectus makes it clear that Angus Geddes and his team are going to invest in whatever they feel like. They reserve the right to trade in everything from equities to derivatives, debt products and foreign currencies, and to go from 100% cash holdings all the way to 250% leverage. While some might see this as a risk, to me this makes a lot of sense. If you believe that Geddes and his team are worth the roughly $400,000 annual fees plus bonuses they are charging to run the fund, it makes little sen se to restrict them to a sector or investment type. With this level of freedom, Geddes can go after whatever he feels will give the most value, and there will be no excuses should the fund not perform.

Cons
Listing price
As a new entrant with a smaller Market Capitalisation than the established LICS, fees are inevitably higher than some of the more established listed investment companies. The Fat Prophets Global Contrarian Fund will charge 1.25% per annum of their net assets in fees. In addition, a quarterly bonus will be paid each time the portfolio ends a quarter on a historical high of 20% of the difference between the current portfolio value and the next highest historical portfolio value. By contrast, Argo and AFIC, two of the largest Australian Listed Investment Companies charge fees of under 0.2% of their net assets per annum. It should be pointed out though that both Argo and AFIC regularly underperform their benchmark indexes, so perhaps in the LIC world you get what you pay for.

Net Tangible Assets
After the costs of the offer are paid for, the Net Tangible Assets of the Fat Prophets Global Contrarian Fund based on a maximum subscription will be somewhere around $1.08 per share. Listed Investment Companies usually trade at a relatively small discount to the net value of their portfolio, as the market prices in the fees an LIC charge. This means we can assume the shares actual market value will be somewhere around $1.05 to $1.07 after listing, versus a purchase price of $1.10. While this is the same for every newly listed LIC, it does mean that any investor thinking of participating in this offering needs to be in it for the long haul, as there is a good chance the shares will likely trade at below listing price for at least the first couple of months.

Wildcard

Loyalty options
Every investor who participates in the Fat Prophets IPO is issued with a loyalty option for each share purchased. From 12 to 18 months after the listing date, shareholders will have the option to buy an extra share in Fat Prophets for $1.10 for each share they own, regardless of what the actual stock price is. These loyalty options are forfeited if an investor sells their shares in the first year and are not transferred to the new owner. Initially this seems like a great deal, as you can double your holding at the listing price if the fund performs well, however the fact that everyone participating in the IPO is issued with the same loyalty options negates most of the benefit. In fact, in a simplified world where the stock price equals the net assets and no one sells their shares in the first 12 months, the loyalty option provides no benefit at all.  
To understand this, imagine that based on these assumptions the shares are trading at $2.20 after 12 months. Initially you might say the loyalty options now give each shareholder a bonus of $1.10 per share, as they could buy shares for $1.10 then immediately sell them for $2.20. However, this overlooks the fact that every other investor would also be exercising their options, doubling the number of shares on offer. At the same time, the company assets would only increase by a third from the sale of the loyalty options, from $66 to $99 million. With $99 million of net assets and now 60 million shares on issue, the share price would now be $99,000,000/$60,000,000 = $1.65. This means that not only would shareholders only make 55 cents per loyalty option, their original shares would have also lost 55 cents in value at the same time, giving a net benefit of zero for the option.
Of course, the real world never plays out like the textbook. Some shares will inevitably change hands in the first 12 months, reducing the number of options available and therefore providing some value to those who still have their loyalty options. However, any investor thinking of participating in this offering should make sure they have the funds available to exercise their options after 12 months if the share price is trading above $1.10, as otherwise they risk seeing the value of their shares reduced by other investors cashing in their options without being able to benefit themselves.

Summary
If you are looking to for an IPO that is going to double your money in six months, this isn’t the one for you. Any gains here are likely to be in the long term. Nor is this an IPO in which to invest your life savings, as the freedom Geddes and his team have given themselves mean that the risks could be considerable. However, if you are looking for a good long term investment opportunity for a portion of your portfolio, investing in this IPO could make a lot of sense. The Fat Prophets team have proven they know what they are talking about when it comes to investing, and if they can get anywhere close to their previous success the fund will do very well.

Personally, Geddes track record is too good to pass up, and I will be making a small investment.

ReTech Technology

SPACS
Overview

ReTech provides online learning and educational services to companies in China. They plan to raise 22.5 million through the prospectus by selling 20% of the company via the IPO, giving a total post IPO market capitalization of 112.5 million. The business has three main arms, an E-learning business where they provide training courses to businesses for staff, a newer e-training partnership area where they will partner with established education entities (they have a memorandum of understanding with Queensland TAFE) and a proposed e-course direct area where they intend to sell courses direct to companies and individuals. According to the prospectus, e-learning is a rapidly growing industry, with a growth rate of 32.9% between 2010 and 2015. While this seems high, service and knowledge based jobs are exploding in China, and online education is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to train staff. Having had the misfortune to complete a few work-mandated e-learning courses in my career myself, it’s not exactly an exciting industry, but the benefits they offer companies are clear. The prospectus lists a few of the courses which ReTech owns the intellectual property rights to and looking at names like “how to introduce the gear box” and “how to recommend vehicle insurance for clients,” you can almost imagine a bunch of bored car salesmen sitting in an office somewhere in China clicking through multiple choice questions.
The IPO funds will be used, amongst other things, to set up an office in Hong Kong. This means that unlike Tianmei, the IPO I reviewed most recently of another Chinese company, the final parent company isn’t located in Australia. While I’m no expert on Hong Kong company law, I think this is a mark against ReTech. With an Australian company, shareholders have the recourse of class actions or potential moves against the board if things go wrong. I’m not sure how easy those things would be to organize against a Honk Kong based company.

Company background

According to ReTech’s website, ReTech was originally founded as a website development company in 2000 by a guy called Ai Shugang while he was still a university student. Since then it has grown and expanded into several different technology and internet related areas. Instead of just listing as the original entity, the founders decided to create a newly incorporated company called ReTech Technology to list on the ASX. They injected their own capital into the business, and then sold/transferred significant amounts of the intellectual property and existing E-Learning contracts to the newly created company. To make things more complicated, at the same time the founders also created another company called Shanghai ReTech Information Technology (SHR) which as far as I can understand will remain wholly owned by Ai Shungang. SHR has also had a significant number of E-Learning contracts assigned to it from the original ReTech entity. SHR has signed an agreement with ReTech regarding these contracts where ReTech will provide the services on SHR’s behalf, in exchange for 95% of the resulting fees. If this all sounds a bit confusing you’re not the only one.
My concern with all of this is that ReTech is in the sort of industry where a founder siphoning off business is a major threat, meaning another business still operating owned by the original founder is a big risk. In the prospectus, ReTech list expertise and their existing client list as two of their four main competitive advantages, two things that would be easy for the founder Ai Shungang to poach to SHR. Although Ai Shungang does own a significant stake in ReTech, he owns 100% of SHR’s parent company, so the motivation for him to do this is there. The prospectus points out that both Ai Shungang and his companies have signed non-compete contracts, guaranteeing they will not operate in the same sector as ReTech, but I know how hard to enforce these contracts are in Australia, and can only imagine what the process would be like in China.  
Finding out what exactly this separate company will be doing given they have committed to not entering the online education sector proved difficult. I eventually found a legal document on ReTech’s website that states Shaghai ReTech Information Technology is going to focus on software and technology development and technical management consulting. To make things even more confusing, they also seem to be still using identical branding to ReTech, based on what I found on a management consulting website. If you trust the founders of the company, probably none of this would bother you but for me these are considerable issues.

Valuation

Before looking at any of the financial information for ReTech it is important to remember that the company was incorporated in its current form in May 2016, and the final part of the restructure was only completed in November. This means that all historical profit and loss figures are pro forma only, estimates of what the contracts, intellectual property and assets now owned by the ReTech Group earnt before the company was split. This is a massive red flag for me. I’m sceptical of pro forma figures at the best of times, and when they are used by an unknown company in a prospectus where the unadjusted figures are not even provided it’s a massive concern. To give just one example of how these figures could potentially be distorted, education software development costs could be written off as not part of the business, while the associated revenue is counted towards ReTech’s bottom line. Examining the pro forma figures doesn’t exactly assuage my concerns either. Have a look at the below table taken from the prospectus, in particular the profit before tax to revenue ratio. In 2015 off revenue of just 6.9 million the profit before tax is listed as 4.2 million, meaning for every dollar of revenue the company made 61 cents of profit. Of course, I understand that profits can be high in the technology sector, but a profit to revenue ratio of .61 is extraordinary, especially when you consider that this is a young company in a growth phase.

Most young companies with growth rates this large are running at deficits as they re-invest into the business, not earning profit margins that would be the envy of booming mining companies.


Even with these relatively major concerns put aside, the valuation appears expensive. The pro forma Net Profit after Tax for FY 2015 was only 3.6 million, which against a valuation of 112.5 million is a Price/Earnings of just over 31 (annualizing the profits from the first half of 2016 doesn’t give you much better numbers). Full year profits for FY2016 are expected to be 5.8 million, a P/E of 20, but if there is one thing I am more suspicious of than Pro forma historical accounts it’s prospectus profit forecasts, so I have little inclination to use these numbers to try and justify the valuation.

Management personnel

When I started digging around on the management personnel, one of the first things I noticed was the strong link to Investorlink, a Sydney based financial firm that seems to specialize in assisting Chinese companies list on the ASX. In addition to being the corporate advisors to this listing (for which they will be paid $380,000), Chris Ryan, an executive from Investorlink is one of the five board members of ReTech. I was already sceptical of this IPO at this stage, but this was the final nail in the coffin. Chris Ryan’s CV is like a checklist of bad Chinese IPOs. Ryan was and apparently continues to be the chairman of Chinese Waste Corporation Limited, a Chinese company that reverse listed in 2015 and was suspended from the ASX in mid-2016 for not having “sufficient operations to warrant the continued quotation.” He is currently the chairman of TTG Fintech Limited, a company that listed on the stock exchange at 60 cents in late 2012, inexplicably reached as high as 4 dollars in mid 2014, and is now trading at 7 cents and he has been on the board of ECargo Holdings, a company that listed at 40 cents in late 2014 and is now trading at 20 cents. I spent some time looking at the various Chinese IPO’s that Investorlink has advised on, and was unable to find a single IPO whose shares aren’t now trading significantly below their listing price. If ReTech are indeed a legitimate company, it’s hard to understand why they would seek to list through Investorlink given this track record.

Verdict

To put it bluntly, I wouldn’t buy shares in ReTech if I could get them half price. Everything from the odd restructure to the lack of statutory accounting figures, the high valuation and the awful track record of the Corporate Advisor makes me want to put all my money in treasury bonds and never invest in anything speculative again. Of course, it’s possible that Ai Shungang is going to turn out to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and I’m going to end up looking like an idiot (to the handful of people who read this blog at least), but that is one risk I am happy to take.

 The offer closes on the 9th March.
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