I generally agree with what you are saying here and whilst...

I generally agree with what you are saying here and whilst having not got down to going through the nitty gritty of the technical details I think you are correct.

However today's announcement is pretty sobering, essentially stating that even for the un-impaired assets they have, they cannot recover them for face value at the moment (otherwise they would, wouldn't they?), hence they are only liquidating what they have to at current prices. Perhaps I have read this wrong.

That raises the query whether the amount of cash they state they have on hand is a marked to market value or face value? What do accounting regulations require? If what they quote is only face value, then the true financial picture could be quite unpalatable.

Even the statement that they only have cash to run to the end of the next quarter is pretty scary. If I were a utility I would not offer to help them (within reason) until they were well and truly over a barrel and I could screw as much equity out of them as possible. So the most likely source of a white knight is from somewhere else and no one wants risk right now...

That all said, there are probably savvy scavengers waiting in the wings for the opportunity to get set at bargain basement prices after the majority of the technological risk has been mitigated, so we have no alternative other than to sit tight.

Why didn't they just hold cash!?

Just some incoherent Monday rantings.

Ps. The timing of the announcement re. technological breakthroughs last week did not surprise me. I expect they already knew alot of that at the time of the AGM but chose to defer release until such a time as they needed to sugar-coat a cash-position related announcement like today's.