Ann: Trading Halt, page-18

I agree that the company's history of capital raising has been pretty miserable:

1. Last year's raising fell far short of the goal and the company had to shop around to place the shortfall.
2. In earlier years the company had tremendous trouble, and at one stage @SimonHackett was funding the company single-handedly with convertible notes! (Simon later converted those notes at a massive loss for himself. Without that we'd have had to kiss out investments in Redflow goodbye long ago)

But I think you would have to agree that the circumstances around this raising are significantly different to the past. These earlier raisings were conducted when there were considerable threats and obstacles in play:

1. The early product was plagued by quality issues in manufacturing at Flex's Mexico plant.
2. The company ceased production entirely to pull its equipment out of Flex and build its own factory from bare earth in Thailand, which meant there was a period of 18 months when there was essentially no manufacturing capability at all.
3. The company had really only just reestablished a manufacturing capability, but hadn't gained significant headway in its target markets when the global pandemic hit and nobody had any idea how that was going to pan out.

No wonder it was a struggle.

This time around I think there is good reason to be more positive about the raising:

1. The company is able to manufacture product on a decent volume.
2. The product range now includes an option that is seamlessly scalable to (smallish) grid/utility scale.
3. The supporting electronics and software is reasonably mature, capable and stable.
4. The product has capable of being seamlessly placed in applications to replace lead-acid battery arrays.
5. The company has gained considerable traction with some really strong pilot installations and case studies, as well as some outright commercial wins with substantial utility and telecommunications players.

With nearly $3 million in the bank, I expect that this latest raising will be to fund a large order. I'm thinking they have scored a significant contract in the mobile network disaster resilience programme in Australia, or a large-scale utility win somewhere.

We will know more in a couple of days.