CEO Jerry Randall talks about Venture Life's positive 2023 outlook

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4th Apr '23 by Paul Hill

6 comments 505 reads

In this upbeat interview, CEO Jerry Randall of Venture Life takes me through today’s better than anticipated results and ‘in line’ guidance - with FY’22 EBITDA coming in at £9.0m (vs consensus £8.5m) on sales up 17% LFL to £44m.

Key top & bottom line growth drivers. Start
Q1’23 trading & Integration of HL Healthcare acquisition. 04:55
Supply chain & input cost inflation. 09:00
Cash generation & debt reduction plans. 11:20
Outlook & future newsflow. 16:25

Disclosure: Vox paid me to interview Venture Life

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About the Author

Paul Hill

Premium Member

6 comments

jonno

4th Apr '23

Not for me Paul. Management well and truly blotted its copy book with the equity raise in November 2020. From memory it raised in excess of £34 million at 90p/share. The CEO and CFO then proceeded to sell 2.75m and 1.8m shares respectively at the same price. I was fortunate to exit at that time for a small profit.

Today's share price 40p! The institutions are welcome. For me, there are far better companies to invest in.

mojomogoz

4th Apr '23

Awful company. Jerry would be positive. He knows how to milk his shareholders to the max.

Copy and paste comment form SCVR:

All those acquisitions plugged into their allegedly superb sales and distribution and Venture Life (LON:VLG) only managed 2% pro forma revenue growth. Slipped in some nonsense in the notes that sales of mouthwash are vulnerable to health of Chinese economy (that'll be a goodwill write down coming?).

In product terms they seem to have gone for the throw a lot of sh1t against the wall and see what sticks approach. Remember this is the management that in late 2020 after claiming massive brand breakthrough (in mouthwashes) with the company moving from contract manufacturing to brand. Looked good and profitable...but that was bs as really they had sold a load of hand sanitiser during covid and called that brand and got a bit of windfall in the process. An honest management would have flagged this as a temporary windfall...but Venture Life presented it as business transformation and new higher level...

...then they raised a lot of money at ramped price, sold their own mgt shares into the placing and then went on to profit warn in 2021.

The usual high profile stock rampers love this stock. Expect them all to exit after they manufacture any pop. Play this game at your own peril. Merit where its dues though...mgt have shown they can spend a lot of money and promote their stock.

TBC the stock may be cheap at current price (assuming adjusted profits real...note 15 to the accounts is critical and not yet published as await full accounts...what is that £3.4m of investment in intangibles...my instinct is to be sceptical...this is a consumer goods manufacturing and distribution biz and costs of production should be straight expensed)...but cheap ain't always enough if there isn't good quality follow through. A few sales and product hiccups and this looks like a very expensive stock with more debt than it can stomach.

Paul Hill

4th Apr '23

Singers upgraded their target price today to 84p/share from 72p before. Whilst separately Cenkos reckon VLG offers "strong upside" with a BUY rating.

Paul Hill

4th Apr '23

Astute stock picker Simon Thompson at Investors Chronicle maintains his BUY rating on Venture Life - adding there's "potential to double in value".

https://www.investorschronicle...

WarrantStar

4th Apr '23

Yes Venture Life might EVENTUALY double in value. But sensible people put a time frame around this. I look at what will happen in the next 12 months. A doubling will not happen in 12 months because the management has a bad record. It will take longer than this for the management to restore their reputation & achieve a respectable PE ratio.

Paul Hill

5th Apr '23

Even if you had to wait 3 years for VLG shares to double in value, then that would still represent a non too shabby 26% annual return

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CEO Jerry Randall talks about Venture Life's positive 2023 outlook

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About the Author

Paul Hill

6 comments

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