No mate, I haven't heard anything about the brother. That has gone all quiet. I'd say "
thankfully", but I'd rather know about the trouble than have it bubbling away under the surface! I'm giving LaserBond the benefit of the doubt though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary!
LaserBond was featured on Aus..Biz's The C.all a day or two ago. The guests gave a pretty weak analysis in my opinion. It looked like they'd simply viewed the share price graph and P/E ratio, and done no further analysis whatsoever. It was disappointing. At least Mathan (guest) know a little about the company. Scott (the other guest, from a well-known stock website) sounded like he was making the information up as he went along.
According to Under The Radar's (small cap-focused stock newsletter) recent publication (29/9/24):
This is pretty fair. Establishing new sites is costly and the work is labour-intensive, but we have a unique product which customers are prepared to pay for. We do suffer from the fact we're a small corporation and small problems can cause big issues for earnings per share.
At 53 cents, LBL hasn't been this low since September of 2020. Looking at the earnings growth since 2020, we are in a much better position than four years ago. Revenue has doubled. Book value has tripled. Earning per share has....stayed the same (according to Commsec). Therein lies the issue -- costs. Arguably, the costs will allow greater future revenue and profit. They were, to some extent, due to unforeseen once-off issues.
The share price has suffered a couple of big days of selling (26/8 and 2/9) and just have not recovered. Perhaps there is no catalyst for buyers to take advantage of the weakened price.
I had e-mailed Cannacord Genuity a couple of times to ask for a copy of their LaserBond analysis (the LaserBond website invites investors to contact them for this document) but maybe my e-mail went to their spam folder. I didn't hear back from them. Very late last night I e-mailed LaserBond. To my great surprise Matthew Twist e-mailed me with a copy of the document (he had contacted Cannacord himself to source it on my behalf) and encouraged me to contact him or Wayne with any further questions. Gee, here I was expecting an administrative assistant to reply in a couple of days' time (which itself would have been great), not the CFO himself writing to me at 7am the next morning. Very impressive and it says to me these guys are serious about their business.
I don't have the technical or financial knowledge to have a strong opinion about LaserBond (i.e. I'm not an engineer or a financial analyst) but I can't fault the information flow or expansion plans. I keep going back to the share price graph and comparing the steady rise, and then flat performance from early 2018 to early January 2024, with the decline from 90 cents to 53 cents today.
Canaccord has dropped its price target from $1.25 to $1.10. If you are an optimist, the title of their analyst's report says it all:
Tough FY24 but coming out the other side in goodshape.
I agree with their analysis about Gateway, which -- especially when the laser cladding services start to generate revenue and we have a full 12 months of WA performance -- the market seems to be disregarding:
"A real bright spot was the Gateway business in WA of which LBL acquired 40% inMarch and which contributed $0.5m to LBL’s EBITDA figure, compared to our estimateof $0.3m. Company commentary refers to Gateway as a much more extensivebusiness than anticipated when acquired.".
Canaccord is estimating ~30% EBITDA growth over the next three years. Not unlike the 2018 to 2024 period, yet the market has seemingly given up on LaserBond. I understand the frustrated "LBL -- Linger Bit Longer" type comments written here previously, but there is enough happening to keep me (an admittedly newish shareholder) very interested.
I bought more shares at 57-58 cents a couple of weeks ago. I'm comfortable with what LaserBond is trying to achieve and the progress made with their expansion roll out. I'll be buying more if we hit 50 cents. Unfortunately there are other priorities, and I only have so much money to divert into the share market. My money tree out in the back yard lost all its leaves for the winter!
(20min delay)