The company has great assets, and I believe there is a fair chance of making a good success of it all. I have to say though you got me thinking about the remuneration of Brian and James, it is extremely high given where the company is at. No one minds reasonably sharing profitable cashflow, but I don't think anyone likes seeing a capital raise paying large directors fees for a pre-revenue venture.
The company lost 1.6 usc a share or 2.4 aussie cents a share for the year. Accumulated losses are $70m usd or about $106 m aud (I presume we can offset these against future revenue).
The share price has halved in the past 12 months.
I think a much more prudent approach for directors fees/salary would be for the directors to take a reasonable portion of the salary as shares or options thereby backing their own ability to commercialize the venture. In doing so, as they successfully commercialize they are rewarded by the appreciation of the share price like everyone else and earn a bigger return then just receiving cash.
Currently a red flag for me is that James has only $30k aud in shares. If the CEO is not heavily invested, I start to worry because it says to me that he has better places to put his money.
So I have decided that while I like the assets, I won't contribute to any future CR while these fees are so high when the company is cash strapped, the CEO has so little investment, and I am sitting on shares worth substantially less than what I paid for them. I have changed my status from buy to held.
Below are all the tables from the last annual report.
