trading halt, page-2

Perhaps just details of the nature of the capital raising to fund Ross Deeptech acquisition - a part placement and/or another little rights issue for holders? Would be nice if that became their standard practice, imo. Most holders would be pretty happy with the last time they did so.

Find it hard to believe Mermaid would even be on their shopping list, let alone merger. Mermaid's localised operation with vessels seems quite at odds with the global, mobile operation NMS is constructing, and also seems contrary to Lange's style so far of collecting smaller gems.

The only reasons I could think of would be if the years of work backed up in the industry is causing too much competition for hire vessels, causing availability and cost problems.

Even then, perhaps it would depend on how much work they have in WA - if they won some gigantic ongoing work project in WA that justified investing in vessels, they might see mermaid as worthwhile - to get the operating expertise, some work and vessels in one go? (How big is Apache?)

Doesn't seem completely out of the question for a company of this kind to get vessels at some stage, but "merger" is a word it is hard to imagine Lange uttering - not until NMS is bigger, anyway.

Anyway, just a bit of guessing, as usual.

Thankfully, with this NMS, we can at least be reasonably confident that the news will be good!