The large holders are committed and trapped IMO Look at their buy in price but they have control they paid a premium for. There is IMO no chance of any premium from corporate action for minor holders of any significance, Predators have avoided that strategy in other companies and to put it simply they have complete control so why pay good cash they can use elsewhere and looks better on the books to take out minor holders? More likely the reverse where they do a issue and the lack of interest from small holders allows them to gain larger %. They simply have a choice of buying out , manipulating frustrated minor interests at a discount over time creeping on the register or having a " friendly " not controlled company doing same. Meanwhile in the unlikely scenario the choccy business does well they can possibly offload it but they have to choose to make the books look good by stripping costs or actually doing specific high quality marketing and getting more sales and hoping it becomes a stable business not as reliant on a few main channels.
Accumlated losses is not as nice a term as " tax credits" and not to be mistaken that it is not franking credit. Nothing hidden and as you say it takes a profitable business to gradually use them.
All I can say it a single controlling shareholder is not necessarily a great thing. It usually causes no interest by others to come onto the register as they will have no voice. It creates a discount scenario unless the controlling holder has a reputation for turning around businesses and generating value for all holders. Does this holder have that reputation? Getting on board etc and paying yourself fees, using subsidiary service companies,of the owners accountants consulting fees etc and all the other outgoings are all possible ways of them draining cash over time IMO where none goes to shareholders. That is the "dividend" shareholder never see but controlling holder can. So lets say they sell the choccy business and money is in the bank. They can just sit as a cashbox " exploring opportunities " sucking out the cash. It will then simply trade at a greater discount to nett assets .
All I am saying is there is risk here. They have tried multiple new product lines - how have they gone? So a bit of history - prior management managed to get into walmart and get sales thus creating value and that value was multiplied as retail punters assumed they could do it repeatably and it was a scalable business in other countries. That speculation caused the price to rise far ahead of reality of their conversion rate. Deals fell through, management paid themselves excessively , countries didn't expand leading to no scale to production and reduction is costs per unit. All done with overhanging legal case and a window of opportunity regarding protected market that closed quicker than they could secure market position. Then came large international competitor to take further edge off.
There is more to small companies than just the accounts there is a whole marketplace and none more competitive than the choccy market with major players with production scale and deep marketing pockets
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