Good morning! Not much news today, as usual for a Friday. I'm going to write a brief report today, as I have to prepare to give a talk on the morning's announcements here at the Derby Conference Centre, at Mello 2014. It's going really well so far - lots of interesting companies and speakers.
PuriCore (LON:PURI)
See the archive for my previous comments on this company, which has a Patented hydrochlorous acid technology, for safely disinfecting food & cut flowers.
The company announces this morning that it is moving down from the main market to AIM. That makes a lot of sense, given that the market cap is only £16m at 31p per share. An AIM listing is cheaper, and less onerous in terms of regulation, and also means that corporate actions are cheaper & easier to do (e.g. Placings, takeover bids, etc).
However, some Instis are not able to hold shares in AIM companies, so this might create forced sellers in the short term. The company mentions that moving to AIM will make the shares more attractive to retail investors (who might buy for IHT planning purposes), but first they need to offer a decent investing case! At the moment the only reason to hold the shares is that the cash pile is roughly equal to the market cap. However, the ongoing business is loss-making, and there's not really any sign of progress.
I would like to see the company bid for, as long-suffering shareholders surely now just want a clean exit at a reasonable price?
Prime People (LON:PRP)
This is a small recruitment company, and its interim results this morning look quite good.
The company today reports a £640k profit on £8.0m turnover for the six months to 30 Sep 2014, which is a good improvement on H1 last year, where they only made £287k.
Note the generous dividends here - 4.09p divis have been paid in the last 3 years, and a 14p special dividend was paid earlier this year.
I see that these shares are up in early trading, so the market also likes their results.
The market cap was £10.6m at 85p per share last night, so there will be the usual micro cap problem of lack of liquidity and a horrible bid/offer spread, so it's really only worth buying on a red day, when someone is dumping stock and…
