Webinar/ results/ cash elephant in the room

Interesting start to the mornings trade, shorters took a few minutes to get their algo going which is designed to sell shares for the lowest possible price unlike most market participants who want to get the highest possible price when selling their shares. I still think this dodgy manipulation is all designed for a cheap takeover of cash printing Clinuvel, but time will tell... onto the reason for this thread.

The webinar was pretty good and there was some very interesting info there which should be worthy of discussion when combined with the annual report. Most of the good stuff relates around growth and this was positive news, I will just use bullet form to do this quicker, so in no particular order:

. It seems we were a bit unlucky with some big EU bulk orders falling into the first week of July - a good start for next year as noted by the CFO. Since this decent chunk of revenue would have mostly fallen to the bottom line I guess then that is bad luck but it seems to be a case of profits postponed. Clearly a manipulated selloff of about 30% is out of all proportion to postponing some revenues/profits by missing the cutoff IMO?

. PW mentioned new expenses report to come with perhaps expenses plateauing off at $50 - $55 Million for the next 3 years? That is pretty much what we had this year with the expense jump so that is good news as Clinuvel have always kept expenses pretty low. With some solid revenue growth we should hopefully have a continued future of growing profits as Clinuvel has also been able to do for many years unlike every other Biotech company of this size that I know. Also doing this while delivering a blockbuster phase 3 in unique as far as I know without sharing with Big Pharma.

. Big news here I thought when they said Vitiligo pricing will be similar to EPP. To me this makes sense when you look at CSL drugs that replace ongoing therapies and have a big one off price tag. This shows what a truly transformative event blockbuster Vitiligo could be for Clinuvel and the great news is the drug is already FDA approved so has ticked quite a few boxes already with the FDA. I believe that Vitiligo patients dropping out of the phase 3 trial when assigned to the control group was a huge tick of confidence in this treatment (the control group is also the standard of care). Luckily the control now all gets the Clinuvel drug as well.

. 104 EPP North America centres now and on target for 120 by this years end.

. Colombia/Argentina first patients next year??

. Did they also mention 2 new countries to come on board in Europe??

. Neuracthel has been a long road but if they are successful here then that will be quite big as it offers diversity and another recent market entrant has shown the potential in this market. Should hear more this year we all hope.

. Dosage increase in the EMA would be very big news and not far off hopefully, it was on the PRAC agenda just this week so here's hoping.

. PW was very impressive with his presentation on bringing a cosmetic to market. No reason they can't do this as it is totally different to drug approval process, they seem to be ticking all the boxes here and it is as always the potential golden lottery ticket. I know a lot of people who will hand over 4 figure sums for a real tanning photo cosmetic. Not priced in at all, ability to leverage off big name celebs/influencers and we are all in the dark if this potential viral product will drop next year as announced.

. Now the 'elephant in the room'. They might have said they addressed it but they didn't. Analyst questions were pretty weak but I did like the one about the accusation of a 'lazy balance sheet'. PW avoided the question with a throwaway line about no one could accuse Clinuvel of being lazy which may well be true but we all know that was not the question. I think he also mentioned in there that the cash is protecting shareholders. Well my opinion is a bit different when the share price is at 7 year lows despite the company being in the strongest position it has ever been in. Average analyst price targets are more than 100% higher than this share price. ASIC data shows ongoing daily manipulation by short sellers to a very large extent. Protecting shareholder interests does not seem to be what it is doing especially when they have announced a share buyback with many fighting words yet have basically done nothing. This year they have actually bought back zero shares yet awarded over 50000 shares internally thus diluting the stock.

The elephant in the room still remains. They could buyback 1.5 Million shares as stated and still have a very big elephant in the room of more than $210 Million dollars but I believe that at least they would have honoured their own words and improved sentiment to a large degree. It is just a simple capital distribution of only a tiny percentage of shareholder cash and basically every company who announces a buyback just does it in a simple manner so it's crazy it's not happening here and it is only assisting the short sellers by not doing what was said. The benefits to already excellent financial performance would be ongoing and also appreciated.

All IMO DYOR