It looks like Afd is correct: unfortunately the 'Market Update'...

It looks like Afd is correct: unfortunately the 'Market Update' back in March was probably intended as a sort of 'stand-in' for a more meaningful quarterly update.

This would have added a little more complexity for shareholders weighing up whether or not to participate in the Share Purchase Plan. Personally I think it would have been nice to have had the chance to run the ruler over some numbers before deciding to jump in.

That said, after giving the matter of the SPP some thought over the past few days, I decided to chip in anyway.

A couple of things that I noticed over recent days made the decision a little easier for me.

Firstly, I was looking at the 'Google Trends' site over the weekend, and something caught my eye when I was scanning over the data relating to the searches for the term 'Electric motorcycle'.

Note the leading two 'Related queries' that show up on the right side of the screen (pictured below). This column depicts the most popular related searches for the users who searched the term 'Electric motorcycle' over the past twelve months.




The term 'elektrikli motosiklet' is Turkish.

What this suggests is that over the past 12 months, a large number of people in Turkey searching for the term 'Electric Motorcycle' on Google couldn't find what they were looking for, and so instead searched for the more specific terms 'super soco ts/super soco tc elektrikli motosiklet'.

I should note here that the results from Google Trends jump around a bit: the previous day those two Turkish searches were in 6th and 7th place.

But either way, the fact that some of the most common worldwide related queries to the term 'Electric Motorcycle' are searches for Super Soco bikes originating in Turkey suggest that there must have been some serious interest in these bikes in that country over the past 12 months, and as Turkey is a very large country, that is quite encouraging.

A second encouraging item that caught my attention over the weekend was a podcast on the Livewire website, or more specifically, some of the comments posted below this podcast.

Patrick Poke, who runs a regular segment interviewing finance experts, spoke to a fund manager called Michael Frazis, who made mention of Tesla in the interview.

This mention of Tesla prompted a comment from one of the usual Tesla whingers, which pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal article on the growth of two-wheeled electric vehicles in China, India and other emerging markets.

Under this comment, there was an interesting reply from Patrick Poke:

...Mike and I actually did discuss electric scooters. But it was not really from an investment angle, so it seemed off topic and I left it on the cutting room floor.

I also had an extensive conversation with Campbell Neal from K2 after our podcast recording about the wonders of electric scooters. I think some of the fundies are starting to pay attention...

While watching the buying and selling of this stock over recent weeks, I've noticed a curious pattern which typically shows up about two or three days in a week, whereby over the course of a day you get this 'chomp, chomp, chomp' type of buying action, and it seems that some large buyer will take out about $10,000 worth of shares in one batch, typically about three times a day when they are active. (possibly there might be some of evidence of this today as well; I'll have a closer look at the trades in the afternoon when the dust has settled).

The pattern is reminiscent of a fund manager in action, however, I have been finding it rather difficult to believe that a fund manager would be eyeing off a company with a market cap of less than $50 million.

But reading Poke's comments above I am now wondering if my scepticism may have been misplaced. He talks to fund managers every week, and so he'd have a pretty solid grasp as to their day-to-day preoccupations.

It does sound as if a number Australian fund managers have a strong interest in electric two-wheelers- Michael Franzis is certainly keen on the Fonzarellis - and this adds some credibility to the notion that a fund manager might have recently started to build up a position in this stock.  

Before I wind up, given the heading of this thread, many here would have been hoping for some quarterly numbers, and alas, from the look of it these aren't going to materialise.

However, if it is any consolation, I've been able to patch together some numbers relating to one important market that this company operates in, namely France.

The reason this is possible is because a French firm called AAA Data, which specialises in tracking registrations, periodically releases the figures on vehicles that have been recently registered in France.

I don't have access to the data directly, however a couple of French websites incorporated the data into some recent reports, making it possible to garner some indication as to the impact of the lockdown on sales of Super Soco products in the country.

The first of these is a report from an electric motorcycle website in early March, which highlighted the AAA Data for the first two months of the year.

The second report, a feature article on Zero Motorcycles, was published only a week or so ago, and includes data on the unit sales of different models of electric two-wheelers across the entire first quarter.

The table below depicts the registration numbers of the most popular electric two-wheeler models in France, based on the data from the aforementioned websites. The figures in the first column, Jan-Feb, is taken from that March report, and the full quarterly numbers are from the article about Zero from earlier this month.



While 50 Super Soco TC bikes were registered in the first two months of the year, only eleven more were registered in the following month.

According to the first report, electric two-wheeler registrations in France were up by 63% in the first two months of the year, but as is apparent in the table, there was a significant slowdown in the last month of the quarter.

Registrations, it should be noted, don't equate with the 'unit sales' metric shown in the quarterly reports, and Vmoto sells direct to the distributors, whereas the figures in the table relate to the end-purchasers of these motor vehicles. Still, the data above does provide some indicators as to how things have been tracking in this one country.

Note that the table above shows all models of electric two-wheelers that were registered, without distinguishing between scooters and motorbikes. However, the French report about Zero included data specific to both electric motorcycle and scooter registrations. Here are the relevant extracts, translated from the original French:

...Between January and March 2020, electric scooters pulled the market up with notably the BMW C-EVO (133 copies), followed by the Orcal Ecooter (x70), the Efun Pulse (x 59), the Super Soco (x57) and Niu NGT (x 52).

But what about true electric motorcycles? With less volume, the sector is dominated by Super Soco and its TC (61 units), followed by the Harley-Davidson LiveWire (23 units) and Electric Motion (19 units). But in this ranking of the top ten manufacturers, Zero Motorcycles is mentioned five times, via its S, SR, DS and DSR range, all intended for urban use. Between January and March 2020, Zero Motorcycles sold its biggest market ahead of Germany in France, 78 motorcycles - all models combined...


My interpretation of the above is that the 'Super Soco' figure in the first paragraph relates to the Super Soco CUX scooter models, whereas the second paragraph covers the most popular models of electric bikes.

Thus, five of the most popular electric motorcycles are types of Zero bikes, making up 78 units combined. Presumably, the super soco tc max and super soco ts models each saw less than 19 registrations, which explains why they don't warrant a mention in the paragraph above.

But these figures do confirm that the most popular electric motorcycle in France at current is the Super Soco TC.

I think that is significant. With a population of 65 million, France is the  second largest country in the European Union behind Germany.

Super Soco bikes also seem to be hugely popular in Turkey, which, if counted as a European country, ranks as the second most populous country on that continent, in-between Germany and Russia.

Considering the points above, it looks to me like the market cap of this stock is off-kilter, and given the prominent position of the Super Soco brand in a number of major countries, I feel confident that  any adverse impact on the sales figures from the coronavirus-imposed lockdowns will be temporary.