Good morning! It's a quick rattle through the morning's small cap announcements today, as I'm off into London again for more meetings. Instem (LON:INS) has issued an in-line trading update, and details of a small (£1.0m) acquisition. Checking back through the archive here, I last reviewed this company's results on 27 Mar 2013, coming to the conclusion that the shares might be interesting at 121p. They have since risen to 164p (although practically all small caps have gone up by that sort of ratio over the last six months).
It looks a good steady company, making £1m+ profit each year for the last four years, but the Stockopedia graphics are not showing it as good value. The forecast PER is 18, which seems a pretty rich rating to me for such a small company that has not been delivering profit growth, and doesn't pay a dividend. So it's not of interest to me.
A new award category should be invented for Earthport (LON:EPO), perhaps the "plates spinning award", for the company which is able to keep promising great things (which never materialise), and continue raising wave after wave of cash, seemingly forever. Their results for the year ended 30 Jun 2013 are issued today (seriously, it's taken them almost 5 months to produce the figures!), and as usual they're diabolical. Turnover rose from £3.0m to £4.1m, and an operating loss of £8.1m was generated, a bit better than the previous year's £9.6m loss.
After yet another fundraising, they had £13.4m cash in the bank at 30 Jun 2013, and ignoring the £1.6m share-based charge on the P&L, their cash burn looks to be around £0.5m per month, so they should be able to keep those plates spinning for another two years before the latest lump of cash runs out.
Remarkably, the accumulated losses from this company now total £120.1m, and still no sign of anything even vaguely near a viable business emerging. As their own former FD told me about 6 years ago, when I visited their offices, "I can't believe people keep putting money into this!". Nor can I.
Results for the year ended 30 Jun 2013 from private jet operator, Hangar 8 (LON:HGR8) look pretty good. EPS has doubled from 4.9p to 9.7p, although at 197p…
