We're holding up pretty well around the $200 million market cap level right now, considering what's lacking is the revenue to support it. People complain about the share price dropping since February but, in actual fact, our market cap earlier this year at 10c is probably very similar to our market cap here now, around the 6c level. What has happened since then is we've acquired Appstablishment (a company making acquisition), acquired Invigo (bolting on trade finance to the Spenda product) and now acquired Greenshoots (e-commerce add on). We have also managed to raise $20 million at a higher share price (less dilution) which is critical to our future growth and funding a debt warehouse.
When I hear Adrian talk about the company going through the stages of crawling, walking and then running, the last 12 months all becomes a lot clearer to me. The crawling stage has probably been the most difficult for us as share holders as it has involved a fair bit of dilution, as mentioned above, and not a whole lot of revenue generation. This stage, in my opinion, has been absolutely critical to setting the foundation for what the company can become. Had we not acquired Appstablishment the company would never be able to achieve the success it now can. Had we not acquired Invigo, we would probably be a long way off talking about trade finance and using up a lot of resources to establish this capability on our own. The same goes for Greenshoots and their team of engineers. Now, with these acquisitions under the belt and $20 million in the bank, we can really prop ourselves up on our feet and start to walk.
I would say the walking phase has already been underway over the latter part of the crawling phase and has involved us getting some foundational customers onto the Spenda platform. As we've been told, these customers cover a number of target areas such as automotive, home furnishings, retail etc. It was mentioned recently that we are establishing a baseline of 100 automotive clients, and when you consider Capricorn Automotive Society is a long standing customer of Appstablishment's, this baseline of 100 automotive clients has probably come from them. Then we've all heard the rumours of Carpet Court (home furnishings) and I personally know of another in this target area that is now onboarded to Spenda. There have also been rumours of a Dome Cafe using Spenda, maybe trialing it in one store before rolling it out across their franchise, and now a tweet about eBev. Let's not forget the referral agreement with Fresh Supply Co (agriculture) which now looks like it will utilise our trade finance arm (thank you Invigo) and the referral agreement with MasterCard, which really could bring us any sort of customer. I forgot to mention Whola, and being an e-commerce play, I wonder if the Greenshoots team had anything to do with that, and perhaps that's why the tie up was hidden after it was discovered.
The establishment of this base, which I believe we've been experiencing recently in the walking phase, is going to be absolutely critical for the running phase. Adrian and the team have set the company up beautifully for what's to come! Spenda has evolved into something far superior than it was one year ago. We were talking about a B2B product that was targeting SME's with a $500k-$2mil turnover one year ago and now we're talking about farmers who need $50 million in trade finance! We have an e-commerce branch, we have trade finance, we have a partner in agriculture, we have a global partner in MasterCard, we are establishing nodes in our key target areas! This is what's going to allow the company to run! 100 automotive customers turns into 1000, turns into 10,000. One cafe turns into a franchise of cafe's, which gets us into their suppliers and the other cafe's they supply. This is exponential growth and what I really believe is meant by the running phase!
A lot of people expect revenue to be rolling in and the share price to be way higher than what it is right now, and sure, if Spenda was still a product that was targeting SME's, the team could have focused on that and maybe we'd become a $5 billion company one day. What I believe we're seeing is the start of something very special and when we really start ramping up, it's going to happen fast. The hardest part is probably onboarding the first customer in a specific target area, such as a cafe. Once we have one, I believe those that follow will be a lot easier to onboard and the referral agreements and nodes will sell the product for us! The slow and tedious part of getting the company set up is just about over and soon the focus can start shifting to generating some serious revenue. We'll see an uptick this quarter but the quarters that follow should show this even more.
So to answer your question about whether we can "Match the likes of ZIP," no, I think we can become something far superior! We just need to be patient, all the foundations have been put into place and the patient will be rewarded!
All in my opinion of course..
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