Danakali Share Discussion Threads

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 15:43

Date Time Price Volume Type Consider
10/12/2007 15:42:33 2.97 50,000 O 1,485.00



Someone had to pay 2.97p for 50K.

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 15:22

JEFF have moved up on L2 today as well:

WINS 2.75 3.5 EVO
KBC 2.75 3.75 KBC
EVO 2.50 4.25 WINS
JEFF 2.50 4.50 JEFF

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 15:15

ADR's are still trading....de-listing should be by friday.

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 15:08

Rack of AT buys just gone through at 3p!!!

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 11:51

20k buy appeared at 3.25p.

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 10:31

Correction: L2 is v.positive at 3 v 1.

[chancer6] 10/12/2007 09:51

L2 still 2 v 1. Nice and stable - believe ADR's may have been de-listed on the friday just gone.

[chancer6] 09/12/2007 17:34

A.D. Frazier, president of Invesco's institutional business from 1996 to 2001.

Investco share price 1996 = $7.00
Investco share price 2001 = $50.00

[tonystringy] 09/12/2007 15:08

Sounds like the right man for the job.

When I was employed by the company (post Kodak OI), I was declared by their own criteria to be the best performing engineer in the UK. Despite this, no one seemed at all interested in how I'd managed to achieve this accolade.

It certainly wasn't that I was the best technically minded but was more down my working practices which could easily have been adopted throughout the company. At the time this struck me as odd and I could see no future for the company.....I left within a couple of months.

[chancer6] 09/12/2007 14:52

Recent Article on A.D.Frazier:

Turnarounds

The copy cat

How A.D. Frazier refocused Danka Business Systems on the bottom line

By Brian Horn

Smart Business Tampa Bay | August 2007

When A.D. Frazier was asked to join Danka Business Systems PLC by some of his friends who served on the company's board of directors, it sounded like a great opportunity for him. "When you do this sort of thing and help things turn around or fix things that are broken for a living and have a chance to do it again, it is a fascinating opportunity," says Frazier, chairman and CEO of the office imaging systems supplier. When Frazier joined the company in March 2006, it was having its fair share of difficulties. It had lost money for several quarters, had debt that needed to be paid down and had a business model that was focused on the wrong end of the balance sheet.

Though revenue was growing, losses were deepening. A previous management team had made an ill-fated acquisition of Eastman Kodak's global copier business using a lot of debt to finance the deal. The acquired business was sinking at the time of the deal and continued to decline afterward, dragging Danka down with it.

"Our sales process was focused on revenue and moving and selling copiers and was not focused on bottom-line profitability," Frazier says. "It was important to them that growth and revenue was a measure of success. Whether that was taking their eye off the ball or whether that was what they set out to do, and they thought the profits would follow, I presume the latter, they didn't."

Frazier looked at the numbers and realized he needed to change the philosophy of how the company operated. The previous management team focused more on revenue and growth, while Frazier shifted the focus to profitability, even if it meant reducing revenue.

He refers to a big revenue number that isn't transferring into profit as "empty calories."

"It's just like when you are on a diet and you are eating something that doesn't give you anything but calories," he says. "That's what dieters call things they shouldn't eat."

Frazier concluded that to get the company back on track, he was going to have to create a new vision for the company that was focused on profits, change the culture to execute that vision and pay down the debt load that was holding the company back.



Listen to your employees

In his first few months at Danka, Frazier developed a vision around what the company was capable of, and he broke it down into three different parts: Make every customer a reference, reduce the opportunity for errors and meet established targets.

Along with using his own experience, Frazier developed the vision through working with the people at the company. By talking to the leadership and the employees, he was able to create buy-in for the vision.

"It's amazing how much you can find out if you just ask people what is going on," he says.

By listening to people, Frazier found he didn't run into too many resisters when he was forming his plan.

"I went on the road," he says. "I think I had over 25 town-hall meetings all over the country with our people and listened to what they had to say and told them what we were trying to get done. They generally were pulling on the same oar as I am. They seemed to be pretty willing to do what I asked them to do."

Frazier says he doesn't have any secret formula to why he didn't face any resisters when talking about some of the ideas he wanted to implement. He simply told them he was there to help the company and focused on doing so.

"I told them when I came here that I really didn't need to work, and I was here to help them be successful," he says. "The only interest I had is to help them be successful. I'm not trying to get in here to make a quick buck and get out, and they are left holding the bag. I don't have an out package and would have refused it, if it would have been offered."

He took a pay cut in May to back up his claim.

Even if some employees would have resisted, Frazier says forcing someone down a path they don't want to go is an unwise move for everyone involved.

"I never felt like I had to force anybody to any conclusion," he says. "We'd lay out the facts. 'This is what we are thinking about doing.' If they bought in, they bought in. I didn't have to browbeat them. If your ideas aren't worthy, then people shouldn't follow them. If they are worthy, then you don't have to beat them into submission in order to get them adopted."

Frazier says it's important to get buy-in on your vision and to make sure that vision is consistent.

"I've been around managing some part of business for almost 40 years," he says. "But the thing I've learned over this period of time is most managers who get fired, get fired from within. They are fired because their people lost confidence in them or didn't have confidence in them. They behaved in a fashion inconsistent with what they said."

Frazier says employees are expecting their leadership to present them with thoughts, themes, ideas, plans and initiatives that resonate with them personally.

Leaders also need to find out what their employees are capable of doing individually, and what the company is capable of as a whole.

"You can almost guarantee certain failure unless you shape your plans around what the company can do," he says. "You can make all the promises to the street or to the board or to the shareholders you want to, but you'll fail because the people you got can't deliver."

Once again, Frazier took a simple action to find out what the company's employees were capable of doing.

"I went around and asked," he says. "I listened to them, read their body language, listened to the words they said, had meetings after meetings after meetings with the key staff and key direct reports and others who had a lot to say about the things they thought had not worked so well in the past.

"It sounds so hard. But, for goodness sake, if you just check your ego at the door, and start by hearing what somebody else has to say and see what you can learn from that, then it doesn't take long to separate the fly poop from the pepper."

Frazier says from there, you must take demonstrative actions based on what you've heard.

"That is what is frequently referred to as walking the walk as well as talking the talk," he says.

Build a supportive culture

Frazier says the company's culture was in desperate shape because of the mixed messages being given by management.

"There were too many senior people at the head office giving orders, and sometimes the orders conflicted one with the other so people weren't sure whether to shoot gophers or rattlesnakes," he says.

One way Frazier gave clarity and improved the culture was renaming the head office in St. Petersburg the "field support office."

"They are working here to support the people out in the field," he says. "The fact that their office is in St. Petersburg gives them no higher knowledge about the business. In fact, they probably have less high knowledge about the business than the people closer to the customers. So, just as a small thing, I said, 'Your job is to help the people out in the field be successful. If you don't have a job doing that, then get one because that is the only kind of jobs we have here.'"

Besides reorienting the attitude of the corporate office, Frazier also changed the culture by recognizing people who made an impact at the company.

"What I did ask the board for and got was the authority to give away stock," he says. "I wanted to be able to give stock awards on the spot to anyone I felt went above and beyond the call of duty at their job. We've given close to 100 of those awards in the past year, and people seem to react very positively toward them.

"It's not much. It's only 125 shares. The stock is only worth a buck so we are not talking about a great deal of money. I thought it symbolized the right values because the employees are working for the shareholder, and I wanted them to be a shareholder. Also, I wanted them to have an interest in stock evaluation and have a sense that they had a dog in the fight when it comes to running this place."

He says putting the culture back on track by giving employees a clear direction and recognizing them helps keep the company in a stable position.

"As long as you stay in touch with your people and do what you say you are going to do, things tend to stay on a pretty even keel," he says. "The minute you start saying one thing and doing another, you get into real trouble and probably should."

Know your assets

Besides redirecting Danka's people, Frazier also had to deal with the company's financial problems.

In order to pay off debt, Frazier had to organize a process for selling Danka's profitable European business.

"You have to pay your money when it comes due," he says. "It's not a choice. So, the question is, where are you going to pay it? Either you earn it and pay it back out of earnings or you sell something and pay it back."

The company went back and started talking to the people who expressed an interest in the European division as a whole or those who wanted to buy parts of it. As it turns out, there was a lot of interest in people buying parts of it, but in the end, Ricoh Europe B.V. ended up purchasing it as a whole in early 2007.

"It was the only thing left that we had to sell," he says. "I didn't want to sell it. I didn't have any choice but to sell it because it was the only asset that people were interested in buying."

The move has dramatically changed the scale of the company. Before the sale, Danka had slightly more than $1 billion in revenue. Now it's about $450 million, and the employee head count went from 4,000 to 2,000. But the move allowed the company to pay off and refinance its debt, dropping the debt burden from $254 million to $120 million, and reducing interest expenses from $29 million to $13 million annually. The company also reduced its net loss from $85 million in 2006 to $29 million in 2007.

Frazier says coming to terms with having to sell a profitable portion of the company wasn't just a matter of doing it. It was a matter of looking to the future and deciding what was best for the company down the line.

"Nothing is simple," he says. "In retrospect, sometimes things look simple that, in the course of undertaking them, weren't simple at all. The need to sell something was either sell something in the United States or sell something in Europe. We had a better-developed business system in Europe with more clearly established market positions and a better structure. So, I thought it would have been easier to sell, and it was, than in the U.S. where we had to rebuild the structure, put new leadership in a number of places and hire a bunch of people.

"So, we had more work to do on this one; although, I felt like from my standpoint, the U.S. business had greater long-term potential. So, if we fixed it, it would be good to keep it as opposed to fixing it and selling it."

[chancer6] 09/12/2007 14:35

Evolution have posted BUY recommendations on Danka lots of times since 2002 but can't find any recent broker note that Yahoo are stating yet.

[chancer6] 09/12/2007 14:24

I thought I was Optimistic with a 10 pence target but according to Yahoo a broker has come out with a BUY recommendation this month with a 1 Year target price of 78.65 pence.

PRICE TARGET SUMMARY
Mean Target: 78.65
Median Target: 78.65
High Target: 78.65
Low Target: 78.65
No. of Brokers: 1

[chancer6] 09/12/2007 10:58

Don't think a company going bust would have been able to secure such a strategic deal only last month which will have positive impact on earnings.

"Konica Minolta's partnership with Danka is evidence of expanding strategic
digital imaging sales opportunities in our channel, and further penetrating the
color and production print markets," said Steve Jones, executive vice president,
U.S. Dealer Sales, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc. "We're excited
about the prospects this strategic alliance brings for customers in key growth
areas of the country, and are looking forward to partnering with a company with
a strong and long-standing reputation."

"We are delighted to have this opportunity to partner with Konica Minolta," said
A.D. Frazier, chairman and chief executive officer of Danka. "They are a major
player in the office imaging solutions marketplace thanks to their cutting-edge
technology. This association not only demonstrates confidence in Danka's ability
to replicate its successful sales and distribution system for their products, it
recognizes Danka's leadership in service and business re-engineering,
particularly in the enterprise market segment."

[chancer6] 09/12/2007 09:41

Good summary pejaten.....my filtered stalker is only posting like that because I'm here. Likes to follow me round on my threads. Not a case of disaster like 8trader and his mate terry were ramping DVS which went bust IMO.

[pejaten] 09/12/2007 09:17

8Trader, no doubt the company is having a tough time, but maybe important to put a bit more color to the position:

1) Operating Cash flow for last three months was negative US$2 million, a considerable improvement on last years US$10 million for the comparable period last year. Free cash flow was negative US$3 million, compared with negative US$14 million previously

2) Although the debt is large, much of it is in "participating shares", who are not paid their interest in cash, but in further participating shares. Yes they need to be re-paid or refinanced by end of 2010, but the conditions attached to the shares are such that it is not a repay or die scenario

3) The re-financing of the other debt is now complete at a much lower level than the previous 11%. The fact that they got the re-financing away tells you more than anything that this is not the lost cause that you suggest.

[8trader] 09/12/2007 00:15

Market cap of around 12 million.

First half loss of a staggering 33 million, debt of over 200 million !

LOL !!!

This is a DOOMED stock !

[8trader] 08/12/2007 14:52

Are you alright chancer ?

You are posting some disturbing signs of mental instability on other
threads, when you claim to filter people then why are you posting on
threds knowing exactly what they are talking about ?

[8trader] 08/12/2007 14:14

Minho.

I think we all can see that everystock on the market represents better
value than Danka !

[chancer6] 08/12/2007 13:58

Well I'm optimistic and I think the price will rise back considerably after or before the ADR's get de-listed next wk. And it won't go bust like DVS did which 8trader was ramping. Filtered sniper seems on the loose again!

[minho] 08/12/2007 13:36

Neg EQUITY,What have they really got? DEBT and can they ever turn this around,needs NEW blood or a complete transfussion.Much better out there.