STRONG BUY, page-223

The only part with anything approaching truth, would be the risks associated with patents (in particular, so called 'roof reports').

The US is terrible for patent trolling, and allowing overly broad patents that focus on outcomes and not implementations. I thought it was interesting (or stupefying) that a merger with Verisk was blocked on monopoly grounds, but then EV were trying to force a monopoly through essentially patenting trigonometry. If that wasn't bad enough, such matters are put to idiotic jury trials, where a bunch of cretins who don't want to be there are conned into thinking some 'evil' company is 'stealing' something, and come up with damage figures based on a group tea leaf reading.

However this is one market sector, and old news given the Pushpin pickup - I'd say they could have done the work themselves, but Pushpin was probably a framework with all the legal credentials sorted that would stop the trolls at EV attempting to pull any shenanigans.

While I've mentioned EV, they're clearly hurting, as they're trying to increase their captures from an existing 12-24 month coverage to 6-12 month. So Nearmap is pummelling them in the frequency aspect, and it agrees well with what I've seen in government contracts. However, EV's plan to do this involves a drop from something like 120 single props (can find link to video/quotes if requested) to 50-60 twinprops, so for that to have any chance of working they would need significant optics upgrades. Given larger planes are significantly more expensive to operate, I can see their margins nosediving.

EV wouldn't be on the backfoot if Nearmap was failing.