It's a bit of a worry that nobody wants to agree with me. Is this a case of the crowd being right, or the crowd being wrong! We'll see. Certainly it's a complex situation at present.
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It's a bit of a worry that nobody wants to agree with me. Is this a case of the crowd being right, or the crowd being wrong! We'll see. Certainly it's a complex situation at present.
Oman, you probably find me frustrating at times, as I'm not willing to post everything I see in my internet searches. But they influence my opinions. For example, what happened to Bioguard was nothing to do with Blis or its potential as I read it, but I'm not willing to post about it because I don't post about things that happen to people or companies. I don't think it's fair to post things that people have no ability to respond to, so I won't do it. It's all on the net of course, but there's a huge amount of stuff that influences my opinions that I haven't posted.
All I can say therefore is that the background information that I consider would probably better explain why I don't think last year's sales revenue was a useful predictor of what will follow, and why I think the new business partners may be valuable assets for the company. Likewise, influenced by a multitude of different small bits here and there, I'm not convinced that Blis shareholders are in a panic or trying to sell nor that the top 20 shareholders have lost heart nor that the company is especially short of room to manouevre. On the other hand, the company report gives plenty of clear facts on what is in train.
But those are just my impressions gained from a host of different factoids and posts I come across on the net. It doesn't make me right by any means. But perhaps it explains why my views don't always seem obvious sometimes.
So I'm not trying to be perverse or argumentative. Faced with the conflict of seeing things but not being willing to post some of it, I try to lay out my logic as clearly as possible. At present that involves going through the cash flows and looking at the business partners etc to see whether the current atmosphere is justified by the facts. As I've explained, I'm not that convinced that it is. The bad stuff mainly seems to me to be atmospheric with not a lot of facts to substantiate it. There is no actual evidence for example that the shareholders are not willing to put up cash now, whereas there is clear evidence that they did so only a few months ago.
Probably that doesn't help with the frustration, but maybe it explains a little. I'm not trying to be argumentative. I just think it's really helpful to have opposing views argued out, that's all. The more opinions the better. I definitely value your posts.
Hi Simla,
I did have a short tongue-in-cheek post placed this morning but cancelled it as I belatedly realized that it could be misunderstood. I've no problem at all with your posts and opinions. In fact they are helpful, but my opinion differs a little, which is probably healthy. Group-think is the last thing we need.
I recall that BLT posted an announcement about the possibility of delisting BLT and the fact that the last fund raising was in fact disappointing and produced less funding than required, hence the need for more cash now. Shareholders were reluctant to fund the business at that time but Edinburgh played white knight. We later discovered that Edinburgh flicked some of the risk on to ACC. How the ACC became involved as an underwriter for a share issue is way beyond my comprehension!
As we all know two of the functions of the market are to set a value on share prices and to be a venue for raising finance. It's because the BLT share price is exhausted that fund raising by further issues is not really viable. They can't seriously issue more shares at the present share price, as I don't believe many people would buy them and the dilution would be unacceptable to current shareholders, so yes why not delist and save the NZX listing cost?
Personally I still have a bucket of BLT shares and would love the price to rally, but reality is that we need some actual marketing progress that returns serious ROI before that will happen. Plans and hopes are not enough. Hopefully Barry will come up with some good news in that regard.
Regarding the umpire and the mythical 'red card', I have no problem with what happened at the Preferential shares conversion. Edinburgh offered shares on market at a low price and people bought them. The only problem I would have is if there was collusion between seller and buyers. That would be a cause for NZX action and a penalty. I doubt, however, that there was collusion and the inquiry report will most likely show displeasure but no illegal trading. Probably there will be no impact on the current share price and trading will continue roughly as at present with sellers outnumbering buyers.
My opinion, and that's all it is, is that the BLT future depends heavily on finding $2m venture capital, which will carry a high premium cost, and maybe a rabbit-in-the-hat surprise that Barry could present at July's annual meeting.
Thanks, Oman. We can but wait and see.
Hi Simla, i nominate you to become a Director. I like your thinking, you are a great supporter of the company. I hold a few shares now, I am sure others on sharetrader may vote for you also. You never know.
Worst case scenario what is Blis worth in Liquidation vs Potential for upside?
I still think Blis will eventually do well, great products that are cheap to make. Probiotics are a billions dollar market surely a big company will add to their milk/yoghurt oneday.
But I have thought that for years......
Ha! Well, that's very kind of you TheOne, I'm sure.
I'm very happy with the current Board...especially if we still have it by the end of the AGM, since recent events may have made the atmosphere interesting. Anyway, as it happens my thoughts mostly only reflect what I see the current Board doing, which is proceeding very logically and determinedly towards the end goal. If I didn't think they were doing that I wouldn't have so much hope. I have no doubt now that Blis K12 will still be for sale in 10 years.
I think the only question on the table now is whether we existing shareholders will be present there. Recent events rattled my cage on that one. The trouble with what happened is that it changed the relative rights between shareholders by what happened on the market. Any situation gets interesting once you move beyond the "all in this together" premise. However, as I have said, the umpire is looking at things, and presumably this is roughly what they are considering, being a broad overview of market trading rules by the Min Econ Dev (MED), if anyone is wondering what the rules are. I've tried to find things in the NZX rules that cover it but can't see much, if anyone knows where that might be.
However, I don't know if anything amiss happened, but I'm glad it is being checked to put our minds at rest, and then we will move on one way or another. One thing definitely came of it, and that is a low share price, which won't make life easy for current funding or confidence, the implications of which are Oman's big concern, and who can disagree with those concerns. All up, I wish things hadn't happened like that suddenly.
Thanks for your kind thought though. I don't think the Board is any problem at all, just the current funding. If we get past that satisfactorily, I'll probably become pretty optimistic again.
By the way, those who aren't keen on the website should probably revisit from time to time. It quietly changes if you watch. The front page could probably still do with some simplification, but already it hangs together noticeably more than it did. http://blis.co.nz
And these pages are surely verging on exemplary?
- http://blis.co.nz/probiotics/blis-k1...ard-boost.html
- http://blis.co.nz/research-studies.html
- http://blis.co.nz/videos-blisk12-bli...hnologies.html
- http://blis.co.nz/blisk12-and-periodontal-gum-disease
- http://blis.co.nz/probiotic-answers/...vel-guard.html
And this looks like a work in progress. It is called Travel Guard advert mk1 and seems to be dated late May.
http://blis.co.nz/media/ResearchPics...dvert_MK_1.JPG
I've decided I could be a bit clearer about what part I think Biog probiotic may have played in the last 2 years' results. I don't think it's fair to recite other people's affairs on the net, but the following are matters of public record and should suffice. I abbreviate the name out of politeness too, so it doesn't add to the net's ceaseless supply of stories.
Here's a post on this group describing Blis's general progress to May 2010, 2 years ago. Many will recall how hopeful we were then, because Biog had been in Costco for the summer to some extent, and Culturedcare had just come out, but next the second half revenue did not grow as we hoped. Puzzlement started, which has dogged us for two years now. But we knew that Biog was going nationwide later in 2010 which seemed likely to pay off. (18 months ago)
But here's a news story in which $3.93 million is awarded against the manfacturer, which happened sometime before September last year, perhaps 9 months ago. And this shows the case was probably filed in April. Perhaps the company knew about it for at least a couple of months before that, or perhaps Feb 2011, 15 months ago. Well, Biog had hit Costco and Riteaid around October 2010 by the look of it, just 3 or 4 months earlier and was presumably using cash in promotional costs.
It seems reasonable that expenditure on marketing was conserved at that point, although that's just a guess. But we do know that the announcement with the last Blis report said "Unable to sustain their promotional activity, the majority of retailers removed them from the shelves and within a few short months they had gone from national retail distribution to limited distribution." They didn't say who, but Biog has to be a prime contender since it was in nationwide distribution. Certainly the product had disappeared from Costco's website sometime last year, and I kept waiting for it to reappear, but it didn't.
So that left us hoping for great progress with nationwide sales in the US for the first time, starting about October 2010 (19 months ago). It took a while to roll out fully as I recall, but actually within 6 months tops, probably less, the manufacturer was presumably looking to its own cash. Our hopes were not going to happen, but we did not know it at the time. We were surprised that revenue did not increase much over that summer, but with this being the only nationwide product, this seems a possible explanation perhaps?
Then add to that the change in global distributor. We know that US sales in first half last year were a mere $8k. So it may be reasonable to assume that Blis raised the possibility of cancelling the contract before any revenue arose last year. Might we assume perhaps that the suggestion was not welcome! Well, we'll never know the facts there. But we also know that the new distributor was not able to commence until Dec 1 last year, and must have taken some time to get up to speed as well. All of which cost the company considerable revenue last year. I doubt many of us would have expected changing contracts to play out in exactly that way.
Add these two events together, and it's pretty easy to understand what happened to last year's income. And that's why I see it as sheer bad luck that is nothing to do with Blis or it's potential. (Happily Therbreath and Jarow are now nationwide and seem to be growing sales.) Then we also have to cope with events with the share price last month, resulting in the price dropping to about 1 cent. I view that as sheer bad luck for shareholders again, creating problems Oman has recently recited.
So, basically, we just had a year of sheer bad luck. After all this time of wondering if the strategy was good or bad, this year seemed to fall into the category of simply very bad luck. That's my conclusion anyway. It gives us a cash situation to deal with now, but if that goes okay then I can't see why things shouldn't continue satisfactorily. We'll see. But I cannot see how it could be reasonable to expect last year to repeat.
Just my view. As always. But perhaps that background info helps some get a feel for recent events. I would have referred to this somehow earlier, but it was only that one sentence with the last report that let me piece the whole thing together.
Interesting and informative research. Thanks Simla. I wonder if more will be revealed at the AGM.
Thanks, Oman. It's how I look at it, and their share price seems to show the lawsuit was important. Equally though, it is view of 2 years projected from just a few facts, so things may have been quite otherwise. We'll probably never know. I just thought the existence of the lawsuit might be helpful background knowledge regardless.