First, thanks @Davisite for sharing your insights and the free work you did in the past 16 months.
I have some questions in case you are willing or allowed to answer them:
Your step down is as surprising as it was your appointment, at least for me. You worked free for 12 months and the 50K you should have got for this year, you already invested back in the last rise. So, you cost nothing for SIS. Of course, it is completely understandable if you have different priorities in life, but it seems it was not a financial reason to step down either from your or SIS’s side. Cutting excessive salaries of directors could have easily saved another 100K imo, if 100k is so significant in the budget of SIS these days. I understand the board and the team is getting leaner for cost savings but it is somehow contradictory to any company in a growth stage.
So, your role as a NED was more like crisis management rather than driving the commercialisation efforts of SIS products? Well, at least this partially explains the huge selloff 2 days after your appointment and straight after the last year’s placement.
What do you think are the main reasons for the lack of tractions, sales? This update shows some progress but it still seems terribly slow in a red-hot sector. I understand they need to close deals but what has prevented SIS from doing it in the past 5 years? Carbonview is a recent product and probably needs legislation changes, but Simblesense should be an absolute winner for a few years now given the energy crises the world experiencing. Do Fadi and Ben have the competence, skills, and leadership to deliver?
Glad to see someone from the UK on the board finally but one should not have been already there for many years if they expect the UK market to drive the growth. It seems from the outside that every management decision is very slow and late despite being a start-up.
More than 3 years ago, they signed a partnership with Sylvania which seems to have not lived up to its perceived "huge" potential so far. Or SHs just wrongly assumed the potential of this partnership? Could it happen to Origin and Intellihub’s partnership too? Are there any reasons for the strong underperformance, difficulties, and lagging in converting partnerships into real sales? Is white labelling or reselling a good strategy for SIS? There was apparently a long strategic update last year but SIS does not seem to do anything differently as they did before.
They wasted substantial money on merger and acquisition talks last year. Given the financial situation of SIS now and back then was there any point in spending any dollar on these activities?
What was the reason for directors to issue recently new options for themselves at a much longer expiry date than the current options? Did they deliberately want to destroy the current options? Though it would make perfect sense to stop further dilution down the road it destroyed the sentiment at the same time. It is hard to read it differently.
What happened to the marketing activities of SIS? Last year, we could see some initiatives but this year hard to find anything available.
You mentioned last year at your appointment.
“People don’t invest in companies they don’t understand, and if we could just get people to understand the big opportunity that’s before us now with Simble, more investors will get behind it.”
I totally agree with that. I know it is not your fault but seemingly nothing has happened to get people to understand the potential of SIS, and this resulted in destroyed SP and sentiment.
What has been the reason for their terrible capital management? Why has SIS never raised enough money to substantially accelerate growth as many of its competitors have done in the sector? Instead, they did a CR around the clock each year with an always worsening condition while they destroyed all SHs values. When they raised at 2.5c and then 2c, A$1.5M each, they were seriously thinking it will be enough in a cash-demanding, fast-evolving but financially troubled SaaS business when all start-ups launched with multiples of that in the sector. What was the plan back then? It was incompetence or just overconfidence and too much optimism.
And last, is there any plan to restore shareholder confidence?
Thanks,
(20min delay)