I'm guessing a new holder now. MA Financial reduced from 10.36% to 7.89%. So 2.7% of the shares sold. Likely new investor to not disclose - or multiple buyers, but I don't think shares would trade up on marketing to multiple buyers. Also, most existing funds likely sellers if anything as Smartpay becomes a higher share of investments with outperformance.
Who knows though, and agree it may not be important, but would be very interesting if it was another NZ fund manager. My thinking with Smartpay is that it could easily trade at double where it is now. People don't seem to like the sales multiples. I only use that as it is the fact at this stage and makes for some easy comparisions. One example in my little portfolio is IKE GPS - similar size, gross margins and growth rate to Smartpay and trades, I think also too cheap, but at about 4x recurring revenue so valued about double where SPY is. Anyway, there is some consensus above on conservative FY23 (March) EBITDA of $21m for Smartpay, so is trading at about 10x that. 10x is more for 20-40% growth, not >100%. Or tapering growth but is accelerating here, and plenty of upside with terminals only 5% of what they see as addressable market of 250,000. They are only getting started really. Younger than what would often be thought of as startups given only launched acquiring n 2019. Earlier has to be higher multiples (a little software company I was involved with raised equity at 17x sales when it was 18 months old - that turned out to be very cheap).
If Smartpay did double over the next year, that would put it right on target for the NZX 50. I usually think of cut off there of about $400m market cap but there are three stocks at $360m and below now. Once/if it approaches that threshold, there will be a lot of institutional buying that likely pushes it well beyond fair value. That is exactly what happened to Pacific Edge a couple of years ago. It's possible current buying is another NZ fund manager positioning for this. Although, it is probably a bit early for that, aside from Milford, they mostly don't even look at these things until the market cap is higher. But, if one of the bigger NZ funds bought in at this stage, it would be a pretty quick re-rating I would think.
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