Steve reckons they have up to 7 years of funding... see the below excerpt from an interview in April this year.
Q. Steve, when I last spoke to you, last September, the share price was $4 and now it’s $1.30. Now, obviously you don’t control the share price and so on and you’re obviously more interested in talking about what businesses are doing. I mean, it must be difficult in your position to deal with a bit of a rollercoaster like that because when your market cap is a billion dollars there’s a lot of expectant investors there. Now there’s a lot of disappointed investors who’ve bought at $4 who are wondering what the hell is going on. How do you deal with that?
A. Great question, how I deal with it? I think we have investors that fall into maybe a couple of buckets. The investors who’ve been with us for a while understand the business pipe and I think we’re very open in terms of our disclosures around the fact that we’re almost two years into a five-year business plan and we’ve outlined some of the metrics around that, some of the aspirations and we’re ahead of schedule. One of the key elements, Alan, is that I think we’ve been very good at supporting our business plan with our shareholders and in July, we raised $110 million at $2.95 and to have that cash balance sheet is a really strong asset for us.
Our view is that technology as a whole has been hit on a macro level. I am certainly not a macro markets expert at all, my job is to make sure we execute against our five-year plan. But I think that at the end of this cycle, companies who have a really strong differentiated technology with a global opportunity, a scalable opportunity, and I guess in our case, the funding to actually execute that for five, six, seven years, we are fully funded for our clients That gives me confidence when I’m dealing with shareholders. It doesn’t change the fact that the share price has gone down, as it has with, I believe, up to 2,000 technology companies across the globe.
What I do need to do is make sure that we keep the team focused on managing the business plan and living against it, because I think when we come out the other side, hopefully we’re a company that’s got strength and assets, including that balance sheet we have. That’s really how I message to the investors, which is, we just stick to our plan, we’re ahead of the game, ahead of our own business plan. We do have an issue with some of our shareholders are obviously employees. We finalised our Speik transaction in November and initially that was meant to be 90 per cent cash, 10 per cent equity. They turned it around, obviously the employees in the business know where the business is going and we ended up paying out with 90 per cent scrip and 10 per cent equity. Their value’s obviously gone down as well, but I think they understand where the business is at and that’s really, I guess, what I’d describe is a bi-polar world of share price going one way and the business going the other and we just need to focus on the things we can influence.
