Dods Share Discussion Threads

[solarno lopez] 17/9/2013 12:50

Pity ASHCROFT doesn't put a spark in this as he has done with SHELLPROOF ..the price has doubled !

[cerrito] 07/9/2013 21:44

4124
They may have been started by DODS but have no idea how they became part of Dods' stable.
I have the Sept 26 AGM in my diary and hope I can make it-have not been for a couple of years.
If I cannot and one of you can good to ensure that the following is on track
quote

Our information
monitoring service is expected to be
on the new technology platform from
October of this year
unquote
Good to see that they are getting digital subs overseas but I am assuming they are selling their UK monitoring services into Germany, France etcet rather than setting up a German monitoring service.
Incidentally for the anoraks like me the Goodwill section of the annual report makes interesting reading ie increasing the cost of capital very modestly from the current one of 10.97% to 11.06% increases the impairment charge by £304k ie more than 5% of marcap

[4124] 03/9/2013 10:00

Has anyone read anything about new acquisitions ? If you look at hxxp://www.publictechnology.net/about this states that they are owned by Dods as does PublicTenders.net. I may have missed this - but there was no RNS that I know about and they are not mentioned in the recent Annual Report. How much was spent ? Are they profitable ? What else was acquired ?

[solarno lopez] 26/7/2013 11:35

In simple terms this is going nowhere and needs fresh ideas.

[4124] 26/7/2013 11:30

The worrying things for me coming out of the announcement today are:

1. £634k of costs of redundancy and payments in lieu. Presume that £383k is re the CEO - but still a large amount for a Group of this size.
2. Reduction of £126k in the deferred consideration for Politics Home. This presumably means that the business is not now doing as well as they thought it would (is it part of the reduction in goodwill)
3. 13% increase in sales staff - but sales are down on the comparative period. So is this more sales people and cost - but not more revenue ?
4. Presumably the narrative in the cash flow of the £6.893m is not correct - it says "Results from Discontinued Operations" - but is the impairment charge. Presumably the auditors are paid to review the accounts ?
5. The Chairman is stepping down - leaving a Board over-populated with Lord A's people (William Wells and Andrew Wilson). Will be interesting to see who comes in.

Overall, £0.4m of EBITDA is not great compared to prior periods. It will be interesting to see if the acquisitions drag it down - or whether the undoubted strengths of the subs revenues allows for some growth in 2013/14.

[cerrito] 26/7/2013 10:27

Not very much in the financial figures to justify a £13m marcap; my current thinking is to hold what I have.and have no appetite to add. I will try to make the AGM
I note the goodwill impairment and one has to ask oneself if there will be another made this year. Willbe interesting the read the goodwill footnote of the AR when it is published.
Note that the cash flow indicated a spend of £1.5m of acquisition of other intangible assets ie not the 2 acquisitions which I guess is the capitalization of r & d costs.
Note that their business is becoming less seasonal
Good that the last few months have been more positive on a number of fronts.
I continue to feel Lords A's interest a 2 edged sword; this fits in well with other things that he is doing ie Conservative Home and means that it will not suffer from neglect but not much alignment between his interests and mine.

[solarno lopez] 26/7/2013 08:31

as I said time they sold everything

[solarno lopez] 14/6/2013 08:58

Time they sold everything and reverted to a cash shell and then let someone who knows what they doing get on with it

[cerrito] 16/5/2013 22:29

Given the recent weakness I half assumed that today's announcement by Susqua was a reduction but I see it is an increase from the 13.975m-4.06%-they announced on March 15-itself an increase from 10.295m-3.03% on September 5 last year

[4124] 19/4/2013 18:40

Surely the issue is that the last 2 full years had Ebitda of £1.9m each. So 15 months - even allowing for a weak first half - including some of the new acquisitions should surely be better than £0.4m. Should there not have been some warning of this. However you look at it, there should have been a profit above £1.0m ? Or have I missed something ?

[cerrito] 19/4/2013 18:01

I note that in the 15 months to 3.13 they had an ebitda gain of £400k; my calculations-which people are welcome to check-are that in the first half to June 2012-traditionally the weakest period-the ebitda was a loss of £0.5ie total loss of £2.8m adjusted for exceptionals, i, t, d and a which suggests that in the last 9 months ebitda was a positive £0.9m which given that it had the stronger second half is what one would expect.

At these prices these shares are not a sell and indeed given the scope for corporate action are a tepid buy-ie the market was right to yawn and I see there was no trading today.
Post VSA one frets about a move to delist but in this case reasonably comfortable with this risk.

[cerrito] 22/3/2013 19:51

Good to see last week's announcement that Sasqua had increased their shareholding; note today's decline with 1m+ share trades equal to the total of the last 17 trading days.
Will keep an eye open to see if I should get more on more weakness.
Went to a political event last week and got a copy of The House magazine and seemed an interesting amount of advertising.
I wonder how they are getting on with Civil Service Training

[4124] 17/12/2012 13:35

£795k in cash for a business which loses money.... Up to £670k for a business that makes £0.1m. So basically paying Lord A £1.4m or to take his loss-making businesses of his hands. Seems a good deal - but not necessarily for Dods ?

Scottish market has always been small - and won't get much bigger. Total Politics is up against The New Statesman and The Spectator.

Is it not time for Lord A to take this Private - which it effectively is anyhow ?

[4124] 17/12/2012 13:32

Acquisitions of Biteback Media Limited and Holyrood Communications Limited



Dods is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement to purchase Biteback Media Limited ("Biteback"), (excluding its publishing subsidiary), and Holyrood Communications Limited ("Holyrood") from Political Holdings Limited ("PHL").

The consideration payable for Biteback is £795,000 in cash. The Holyrood acquisition is to be settled by £416,806 in cash plus a further potential payment of £250,000 if certain gross profit targets are met. Biteback Media Limited publishes Total Politics, a monthly political magazine, and organises associated events. Biteback generated an EBITDA loss of £0.35 million for year to 31 December 2011 on revenues of £0.47 million. Based on the management accounts for the ten-month period to 31 October 2012 Biteback generated revenues of £0.7 million, an EBITDA loss of £0.1 million and had net assets of £0.2 million after an adjustment for intercompany loans. Holyrood is a publishing and events business based in Edinburgh, with particular focus on Scottish politics and current affairs. The acquisition of Holyrood will enable Dods to benefit from the increase in political activity in Scotland over the next two years. In the year ended 31 March 2012 Holyrood achieved revenues of £1.9 million and generated EBITDA of £0.1m.

The acquisitions will provide new cross selling opportunities for the Company's existing products thereby strengthening Dods' position as the leading UK provider in public affairs communications. The board of Dods expects both Biteback and Holyrood to be earnings enhancing for Dods in the year ending 31 March 2014.

The acquisitions constitute a related party transaction pursuant to AIM Rule 13, since Biteback and Holyrood are majority owned by Lord Ashcroft KCMG, a substantial shareholder in Dods. Having consulted with the Company's nominated adviser the directors of Dods, other than Andy Wilson, who is not considered independent of Lord Ashcroft, consider the transaction to be fair and reasonable insofar as its shareholders are concerned.

[solarno lopez] 17/12/2012 13:08

This is very poor they should be concentrating on buying quality business and tup n ahlpenny business that are going nowehere.

As for cross selling that does not often work oh dear oh dear management have no idea how to run a business

[cerrito] 17/12/2012 12:53

The price paid to lord A for biteback seems very generous and will be interesting to see how earnings enhancing it will be.
I have less of a problem with Holyrood.
Ongoing issue with LordA's 44% shareholding..let's hope ISIS were robust with their 26%.

[kimball808] 08/10/2012 21:02

So back to the glory days of 80p are not any time soon....

[cerrito] 28/9/2012 10:57

Having read the interims a bit perplexed at the situation but I am wondering if the shares will soon warrant a little nibble.
They have a new Ceo, cash and as they say supportive shareholders.
They are in an interesting space, but the big thing for me they lack is earnings/business visibility.
In this respect three things stand out: the continued lack of clarity on Civil Service Learning; decline in print products; and decline in Party Conference activity.
As discussed before not clear to me that the Competition Commission will allow them to do significant acquisitions.
Probably sensible that they are making the IT investments.
Two other things that struck me: one is continued little reference to Europe activities which contributed 22% approx of H1 12 revenues; and the £377k redundancy payment to ex CEO Murray.
Lord A's presence a double edged sword. He is obviously a sharp cookie and has interest and interests in this space but are his interests aligned with that of the small shareholder?

[cerrito] 30/8/2012 12:25

Took some time to work out what today's RNS was saying but it is just a much delayed recognition of the fact that as Baronsmead did not join the last placement the proportion of the company that their unchanged shareholding of 68.4m shares is now 20.12%.
We will be having an update by the end of September when they have to produce their prelims; one would like to think that in August and September there will have been a breakthrough in the Civil Service Learning contract but to me that would be a pleasant surprise.
In the past they have made useful money out of the party political conference season but my understanding is that that these will be quieter than in previous years.

[cerrito] 31/7/2012 17:22

Reading today's announcement about Sir William Wells, missed the fact that purchases went through at 6.5p last friday
seems to have been quite a bit of activity this afternoon

[4124] 26/7/2012 12:01

While the Placing will raise money - not sure that I would trust it to the large shareholder when he basically can do what he wants with a Board that he controls and no CEO.

It is also "amusing" to see that one of his "boys on the Board" - Sir William Wells - bought 250,000 shares a couple of days before an announcement that increased the share price by 25%. Amazing coincidence I am sure.

I guess we will have to wait for the Interims to learn about any strategy - or who is running the Company.

[cerrito] 25/7/2012 22:31

I need to say I did lighten up this afternoon a bit to take advantage of the share price increase.
Not terribly comfortable with Lord A having 44% of the shares; note the AGM statement that life is tough and one has to ask if the Competition Commission will be more flexible with other companies they want to buy; at first a bit surprised at the mention of IT spending in today's announcement but to be fair this was well flagged up in the Annual Reports for both 2010 and 2011 although not apparent why they need so much money for it.
I was interested to read note 15 of the Annual Report and their discussion of why the share price is so low and of course as they acknowledge one reason is the every day smaller free float.
Going into this brave new world without a CEO, though for now saving his remuneration expenses- £284K in 2011. More disturbing is the fact that there is no CEO and a new Finance Director in situ only since April 14th this year.
Pleased to see that the director's fees of the very powerful board are not that great and indeed the Chairman's £35k is quite low.
Disappointing to see that the Aim 26 information on the website is so out of date-probably sums up their attitude to retail investors.
I have calculated that they have now approx 340m shares outstanding. Lord A has 150m; ISIS Private Equity/Baronsmead VCT 69m(20 odd%); Artemis 27m ; Schroder 20m; Sequia 9 m. 80% of the shares are held by these top 5 holders.
Welcome others double checking these figures.
I have been a shareholder since March 05 and way out of the money with an average price of 17p.I liked to think I understood the company and went to many AGM's. My concern is I have no real feel where they are going and what they are going to do with all that cash so am not looking to buy more.

PS Incidentally given their frustration with the Civil Service Learning contract, I googled it and found this

Nothing since this February
PPS Somewhat surprised that no mention in the AGM trading update of their French political division and Le Trombinoscope but may be too small or the business will come in the second half.

[hjfe] 25/7/2012 15:57

Over 700k shares traded today - there must be some confidence out there.

[hjfe] 25/7/2012 13:40

Placing at 5.5p - taken by Lord A.

Could get interesting here now.