They've already contemplated takeovers and spoken about them,...

They've already contemplated takeovers and spoken about them, but they surely aren't currently wanting it to happen at this stage. Most often, takeovers happen before the board want them to, and often the board don't want it at all.

Hypothetically, if we are on a trajectory for, say, $1 SP/800m Market cap, plenty would love to buy us now at say 40c/200 million market cap. It makes a lot of sense to buy it now for a quarter of the price. The board would definitely not want that because they're out of a job and they have huge shareholdings, but a hostile takeover doesn't care about that, they want the business and they want to save hundreds of millions of dollars rather than paying the board and the shareholders.

Hopefully in our real world situation, would-be hostile entities will leave us alone because they know we have a good board, and the board is going to grow the business. If we go by the above hypothetical (I'm not saying it's necessarily particularly accurate, you can plug in your own more realistic figures, but conceptually at least they do work), our board being able to achieve that growth may be better than what the takeover entity can manage to achieve with the business if they take control at this stage, so hopefully they will wait until the company is more mature and developed. They will have to pay more (which benefits us and the board) but also the takeover entity because while they pay much more, they're getting better value.

That seems to be the plan anyway, and I hope it pans out that way. Let's not kid ourselves though; plenty of hostile takeovers take place and then fail, and there's always the chance that they may actually be competent. Whether or not they're competent doesn't much matter us once they buy us out though.

As long as it's not for 2+ years I'm happy with a takeover, and as long as it's at least a year away I won't be too upset. The way things are going, I think we're safe for a while because a takeover during such a period of change and expansion would be difficult and they'd have to pay a fair premium to avoid the attempt failing. A failed takeover attempt is something I wholeheartedly welcome!