Nakama won't feature on the radar of many investors and as a micro cap recruitment player that is quite understandable.
With a market cap of just £1.4m and the shares at 1.2p it is fair to say that most investors wouldn't afford it a second glance, particularly given the companies past track record. That said, as a speculative turnaround situation NAK is interesting, not least, as its two major shareholders are both private recruitment companies. Sheffield Haworth sits on 24% whilst more recent investor First Point holds 29.2% of the company.
Miton also sits on 8.8% whilst Ken Ford Chairman of one of my long term holdings SDI holds 4.2%.
Nakama sits in the recruitment spot of technology and finance with operations in London/Hong Kong and Singapore, having recently exited Australia which had accumulated losses.
From a personal perspective I have been in since 2017 when Sheffield Haworth bought its stake at 1.8p, at that time the operation was run by Rob Sheffield (no relation to Chairman Tim Sheffield of SH) and I think it is fair to say the business bore all the hallmarks of being run as something of life style operation! Sheffield Haworth soon initiated change and the board was completely revamped with the then existing Directors stepping down.
Andrea Williams was installed as an interim CEO and took the necessary and much needed hard decisions to instigate the turning around of the business as after all, with such a tiny market cap there would seem little point for such a company to be listed.
Along the way First Point bought in, mopping up shares from the previous Directors although its strategy or intentions were, as far a I could make out, unknown! More recently Andrea Williams has moved on and the highly experienced Robert Thesiger has taken up the mantle of CEO.
The company has now returned to profit as revealed in its preliminary results and the interim's are due out later this month, after which I should be catching up with the CEO, so it will be interesting to see how the numbers pan out.
At one point it looked as though a reverse takeover was very much on the cards here and that could still be the case as there would seem little doubt that both SH and FP must have intentions of some sort in order to…
