@Lavidge I disagree and possibly didn't make my point clearer, I think at the moment the market is ascribing virtually no value to the core businesses of touchcorp and is valuing the upside and downside based upon AfterPay alone. Even with that, it is borderline questionable as to whether there is that much downside risk at these prices. Also can I ask you what the source is for the increase in debtor days for Afterpay you alluded to above- if it is industry knowledge feel free to say so. I would imagine that overall new customers have higher default rates than returning customers, so if you onboard a lot of people at a time there is likely to be natural increase in defaults, but could also be considered a customer acquisition cost, but this is all hypothesis with no factual basis from an industry outsider.
Much of the upside from here is actually if you believe that Touch' business model actually works in the long term and has some value. If so, then that is pure upside at these prices if you value AFY at market value and consider cash position. Of note, there will obviously be some arbitrage as some AFY holders will switch across to TCH and more importantly, people with shorting facilities will open long-short pair trades if there is enough historical correlation (which I believe there should be anecdotally)-> but this may just cause AFY to go down rather than TCH to go up in price! I think it is performance of core business that is going to be the meaningful kicker to the shareprice in the longer term, whereas AFY may anchor the price in the short term. Of note- this is not a high risk technology stock with a short history of losing money, it is a long-standing business with a long history.
A note on revenues...forget about the profits, really can't make any comment without the financials and even then it is pretty hard!
@Backyouranalysis - There is core transactional revenue then lumpy revenue from these "incubator investments" (I believe this is the first time they've used that in reporting but I could be wrong). In the last FY it was 13.3 from Afterpay and this FY it will be 11.1 from ChangeUp. If you strip out these abnormals then yoy revenue growth has been between 10-30% for each of the last 3 years. No matter how you spin it revenue will be down on last FY on the basis of this update.
But again as the revenue recognition is complicated I instead choose to focus on the cash receipts.
Going back the cash receipts have been & growth has been 15-20% yoy consistently.:
147.5 / 170.8 / 197.6 / 240.2 / 283. 5/ (298)
The 298 is annualising the HY which is obviously incorrect on many levels but is illustrative- this value gives a 5% growth.
The "cash receipts margin" has been:
4%/ 8 / 8 / 8 / 12 / ?
Of note the 4% margin was during the last year of very heavy expenditure prior to 2015, and the investments since 2015 almost certainly have longer lead times to pay off.
So either the transactional counts have actually dropped (= lost client, meaningful changed in contract) or as I see it more likely that this "cash receipts margin" has actually dropped to more normal levels.
The right way to go about increasing this is probably focussing on sales which can hopefully be done on a profitable basis- and I am not 100% sure on that (I am yet to see the payoff on the >10m customer development expense).
Again welcome others FA thoughts. Will try to add when I have more time.
