"Are they buying their own shares on market? Thanks for the info in advance"
In a word, yes.
From 2012 onwards, PME have given themselves the option of buying back up to 10% of the shares on issue by lodging the appropriate ASX notice.
The general idea is that a company can invest in itself if management thinks that that offers a better use of its money than alternative investments available to the company.
In general, research has indicated that buy-backs are a positive for a share holder return.
It can be a way of returning surplus capital to owners. It is also a way for management to signal to the market that management thinks that its shares are undervalued.
Buy-backs can also be abused by management to support the share price for reasons such as ensuring that they get an incentive payment or some such.
The thing about PME's use of buy-backs is that when it comes to actually exercising the buy back, they have tended to have short arms and long pockets.
So no one could accuse the management of wantonly using the past buy-backs to support a flagging share price.
PME exercised a buy-back in April 2012 to buy shares at $0.25 and again in December 2016 to buy shares at $4.50. On each occasion they only bought a about 16,000 shares or about 0.015% of the shares on issue. I have marked the buyback occasions on the charts below.
Each approximately corresponds to a local low in the share price chart, which was subsequently has been left in the dust.
So, in PME's case, the exercising of the buy back seems to be more a matter of signalling to the market that management knows that the shares are good value at these levels.
And what's more, based on their track record, I think they are in a position to know!
Cheers
(20min delay)