Good morning, it's Paul here.
Fridays are usually slow for news, and I'm pre-occupied with macro views, given that we're going through absolutely unique circumstances. There has never been a time where the economy has been shut down for a while. Not in living memory anyway. Maybe at times when they didn't know what "the economy" was?
Hence the focus here has inevitably changed a bit from ploughing through largely irrelevant pre-covid company results, to guessing about what the future might hold.
Estimated timings - very, very leisurely. I'll do what I can by lunchtime. There is literally nothing of interest in the small caps space today, so I'll add a few sections on stuff I missed earlier this week. I'm aiming to finish by about 3pm.
Boohoo (LON:BOO)
A long time favourite SCVR share this one! Now far too big for my remit (market cap over £4bn), but it's good to keep an eye on what is a truly exceptional business. I still see this as a major long-term winner, and want to get back in at some point.
There was an unexpected announcement last night, saying it was raising close to £200m . Unexpected, because it is already sitting on a cash pile of £240.7m.
Another update this morning says it raised £197.7m at 340p per share. that's a fairly small discount (the current price is 356p, up 4.5p today). Dilution is small, so I don't think private shareholders need to worry about the terms of the deal. It would be good if private investors could be included in fundraisings too, via the excellent Primary Bid platform. Particularly for a consumer-facing brand like BOO, it should be actively courting private investors.
The additional cash is for acquisitions. I imagine there are likely to be numerous opportunities for BooHoo to buy up well known brands that fail in the High Street. BooHoo then buys the brand, and bolts it onto the existing BooHoo platform. After 2 or 3 years growing the brand, it's another profitable element to the group.
The sky's the limit, in terms of what this group can achieve. It's already got about 6 brands, and that could conceivably keep growing into substantially more.
The Group intends to use the net proceeds of the Placing to take advantage of numerous opportunities that are likely to emerge in the global fashion…
.JPG)
