Pre 8 a.m. comments

Good morning! I'll concentrate on the interim results from Zytronic (LON:ZYT) between now (7:17am) and 8:00am. Regulars will recognise it as a company I've followed closely, but not yet invested in. They warned on profits in an unscheduled RNS at 11:30am on Fri 10 May 2013. This is the investor's worst nightmare - an intra-day profits warning, where you just get an email, or a panic call from your broker, and you're forced to make a snap  decision on how to interpret the statement, and whether to sell, hold or buy. That's not easy for people like me who sit at their screen all day, but for people who are doing other things it's a lot worse, they might not be able to react. Therefore there was another plunge on Monday morning, as people who hadn't seen the announcement in time on Friday also panic sold.

I read the warning, and thought immediately, "this is really bad", and at that point you could have sold a small quantity at 270p. Within minutes the price had crashed to under 200p. On the following Monday it plunged again, under 150p. I was watching like a hawk, ready to pile in if it got to 100-120p, but it didn't. I clearly saw the Level 2 beginning to turn, and when the Offer price had risen to 153p, and the Bid price was closing in fast, and had got up to 152p, it was pretty obvious that the worst was over in the short term.

Unfortunately I dithered, and didn't have any spare cash anyway, and was too late to buy, and the price quickly shot up to 170p, which seems to have acted as a floor this week, and we're now up to 185p.

All exciting stuff, but let's have a look at the interims to 31 Mar 2013.

Firstly, I should say that at 185p and with 14.9m shares in issue, the market cap is £27.4m. Net cash reported today is £2.8m, therefore the enterprise value is £24.6m.

 

H1 was expected to be poor, this has been previously flagged, but the big difference now is that the hoped for recovery in H2 is not happening - this is what triggered the profits warning just over a week ago.

H1 sales are…

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