Company News

Abbey Protection – a lowball bid offer

  Abbey Protection (ABB) is an AIM listed insurance company with a current market cap of £115m. The shares have traded between 116p to 122p in the last two months, with a reasonable volume for an AIM company. But yesterday the directors announced a recommended cash offer of 115p per share for the company from Markel Corporation. This is a very unusual situation because usually there is a “bid premium” for control of a company. The market price was presumably what willing buyers ...

How to pick small cap stocks – just follow Harry Nimmo

Yesterday was the Annual General Meeting of Standard Life UK Smaller Companies Trust and those who like investing in small cap stocks would have found it useful to go along and learn from the master – fund manager Harry Nimmo. Gordon Humphries said that the company is basically “Harry’s 50 best ideas”, i.e. it’s a conviction portfolio but with no individual holdings allowed to go above 5%. It has a fairly low yield at 1.4% currently but that has grown at a ...

City of London Investment Group (CLIG) – a confusing AGM today

City of London Investment Group (CLIG)  – a confusing AGM today I’ll try to tell you briefly “the way it was” to paraphrase the CEOs introduction to his section of the Annual Report. A full report is available here. Barry Olliff is the CEO and this company has succession problems just like Carpetright which was covered in my last blog post. Likewise, they are back at square one after losing a new CEO appointed at the end of 2012, but who departed with ...

Robert Peston goes shopping and Carpetright

Last night a new series of TV programmes called “Robert Peston Goes Shopping” was launched on the BBC. It told the story of how a few individuals changed the nature of retailing in the UK in the 1950s and 60s. People such as Stanley Kalms of Dixons who was interviewed, Marcus Sieff of Marks and Spencer, Jack Cohen of Tesco and the Sainsburys. Typically these were dominant and self-driven personalities who adopted new methods to attract retail customers from their competitors. ...

ShareSoc Technology Company Seminar Report – Armour, Ideagen and Regenersis

A full report (and copies of the presentations) on the ShareSoc Technology Company Seminar has been posted to the ShareSoc Members Network here. Companies presenting were Armour Group, Ideagen and Regenersis and one presenter said his company was a “potential ten bagger” which might have been somewhat injudicious, but you’ll need to read the report to find out which. Roger Lawson

New pay rules, and MS International

Yesterday was the dawn of a new era. The rules that impose the requirement of a binding, forward-looking vote on remuneration at UK listed companies came into force. Also there will be much clearer information provided on total remuneration, making it easy both to compare the figures with those of other companies and decide whether you like the numbers. It might not totally solve the problem of excessive director pay in FTSE-100 companies, but it is at least a step in the ...

Dotcom bubbles – Mark 2 – ASOS

It’s noticeable that the price of on-line retailer ASOS has fallen back slightly of late. It seemed a good idea to look at what the current share price is assuming in terms of forward projections on growth in earnings. Now you can debate whether the near-term growth is 20% per annum or 30%.  Analysts’ projections seem to assume about 30% for future growth, whereas the interim results only showed growth of 22% (although sales were up 34%). The following tables show the ...

Victoria AGM Report Summary – Chickens home to roost

After last year’s battles for control of this company, yesterday’s Annual General Meeting was a tepid affair (see past ShareSoc press releases and AGM Forum  reports for more information on the past fights). Apart from the depressed state of the retail carpet sector, the wholly unnecessary exceptional costs incurred in that battle, and the subsequent restructuring of the business (which was long overdue in my opinion) resulted in an overall loss of £2.7m for the year ending March 2013. Revenue fell from ...

Share Options and Perverse Incentives (Nokia and Elop)

Outrage about the amount Stephen Elop is getting (Euros 18.8m) for selling the mobile phone part of Nokia to Microsoft extends from the Finnish Prime Minister to the editor of the Financial Times. It is not helped by the fact that Mr Elop left Microsoft to join Nokia as CEO, and is now returning to them. Mr Elop did not manage to really revive the mobile side of Nokia while he was there, although some might say he established a base ...

Diageo votes at AGM – more opposition

This morning Diageo announced their voting results from the poll at their AGM on the previous day. Isn’t it annoying when the poll is not declared at the meeting so shareholders cannot question the board on the results? But that aside, they got 11.8% against the Remuneration Report, up from 7.5% last year. This rather reflects the complaints in the meeting itself about the general level of remuneration in such large FTSE-100 companies. It seems likely that last year’s figures were somewhat ...

Real Good Food – an example of poor AIM corporate governance

Chris Spencer-Phillips, a ShareSoc Director, attended the AGM of Real Good Food last week. This is typical of many AIM companies in that it has very poor corporate governance. They have an Executive Chairman, who refused to answer the questions from a shareholder at the meeting. In addition they have pay which is wildly out of line with the profitability and general size of the company. That includes £798k (including consultancy fees) to the Chairman, plus share options; and one of ...

Lloyds Bank stake sale

The Government is selling 6% of the shares it holds in Lloyds Banking Group at about 75p via a placing. That is marginally more than the shares cost them when it bailed out the company after the disastrous takeover of HBOS, which many shareholders still feel very disgruntled about. If the Government is selling, should private investors now be looking to buy? After all the shares have doubled in price in the last year, well outpacing most other UK banking stocks.  But ...