Morning all,

A very quiet day in RNS-land today. Which is helpful seeing as I've been occupied with a wide range of administrative chores. Being self-employed can be very complicated, as I'm sure some of you will appreciate!

Anyway, that's my excuses out of the way.

Today we have interim results from System1 Group, a company that is no longer in my investible universe but which I'm happy to keep half an eye on.

I can't see anything else of interest so I suppose this is the bit where I take requests and ask if there is anything from earlier in the week that I missed?

Cheers

Graham



System1 (LON:SYS1)

  • Share price: 195p (+8%)
  • No. of shares: 13 million
  • Market cap: £25 million

Interim Results

Let's see how Brainju... I mean, System 1, has been doing recently:

This table says it all:

5bdc46265d973SYS1_20181102.PNG

The key points are as follows:

  • revenues and gross profits down, but...
  • underlying overheads also down significantly, with average headcount down by 19%, so we get a much improved underlying PBT result from consulting activities (£1.92 million vs. £1.1 million).
  • System1 breaks out the £1.09 million spend on developing its new Ad Ratings product, so that we can treat it separately. That's fair enough.
  • The result this period also benefits from the lack of any share-based payments. Good.

So what are the most important numbers in this table? I would say that the £1.9 million in underlying PBT from Consulting is the most important one.

We do have to bear in mind that this figure is before share-based payments, which are likely to feature again in Systems1's future.

It's still a decent result and makes the shares look modestly priced with a £25million-odd market cap.

AdRatings: £1.59 million in total has been spent developing this new business line. Of that amount £1.09 mllion was expensed (i.e. included on the income statement) while the rest was capitalised (i.e. recorded as an asset on the balance sheet).

Cash: System1 has historically had a very strong balance sheet and cash pile. With the increased investment, cash reduces to £3.55 million. That's still plenty for a company of this size.

Dividend: unchanged for now, but the final dividend may be reduced.

CEO comment: excited about the new Ad Ratings service, and thinks the existing business "will continue to stabilise and in…

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