Seneca Growth Capital Vct Share Discussion Threads

[jonwig] 07/4/2012 08:25

rivaldo - not sure it was me who moved the sp: there was another buyer with more. But the reason I bought a few is that I think there will be a bit of catch-up - a discount of 30%-40% is more normal for a VCT I think, meaning 50p-60p as the share price I didn't want to miss that.

As for buying more, that will depend on the progress they make in resolving the issues, and whether the SCLP rise isn't reversed.

[rivaldo] 06/4/2012 18:15

Jonwig, I might try to get to the AGM, I'll see nearer the time.

A lot depends on SCLP and where it goes from here. I agree re Hallmarq, and I also think Immunobiology's valuation is a little rich. And of the quoteds, EKF's £100m m/cap looks pretty unsustainable to me given past and forecast profitability.

But as i wrote earlier, I suspect Freehand was a real steal. I was unaware of the prospective AIM float, so that's great news - as you say, this could be big news for HYG.

I've spoken to Charles Breese in the past. He's a very solid guy and worth talking to.

Interesting that you moved the price slightly on your purchase of 2,500 shares! Are you in the market for more (if you don't mind me asking)?

[jonwig] 06/4/2012 12:22

A few more thoughts on this.

A 5p dividend would cost £400,000 compared with their current £300,000 cash in the bank.
There's also the question of further fundraisings from either SCLP or Immbio: a £1m would require of the order of £60,000 from HYG to avoid dilution.
To be fair to HYG, they do say in the results that they have some issues to resolve:

It is also clear that it is difficult for a small fund to continue to support its investee companies and retain our stake without dilution and to date we believe we have been successful in balancing the needs of our investee companies with those of our shareholders. However we are currently exploring ways in which we might attract further funds into Hygea and we hope to be in a position to communicate these to shareholders later in the year.

SCLP seems to be benefitting from some of the hype which can be read over on that BB - I've no way of judging how realistic that is, but there's a chance HYG's share price will be carried along.

Hallmarq Vet is a pretty rich valuation, about £7.8m for the whole company based on sales of £2.7m and op pft of £188,000. Again, I don't know how reliable that is.

A really interesting one is Freehand 2010, which appears to have a total valuation of just £1.25m. Now judging by this link (Dec 2011) ...



... Freehand is being prepared for an AIM IPO this year. I doubt it would be worthwhile any company coming to AIM with such a low pro forma MCap, even 'blue sky' - and Freehand looks to be further advanced than that. Of course, if the IPO raised lots of new money, HYG would be diluted significantly, but there would still be a substantial uplift for its share.

EDIT: the Charles Breese who is the IPO contact is also a director of HYG.

Are you going to the AGM in May? I can't.

I see you've posted over on iii, so I'll copy this across. Meanwhile I picked up only 2,500 shares yesterday.

[rivaldo] 05/4/2012 09:01

Look forward to your comments.

I note that SCLP is today up to 15.75p. That adds another 3p onto NAV, which would now be around 89p.

[jonwig] 05/4/2012 07:36

Thanks for your comments, rivaldo - plenty to look at over the long weekend!

If I do buy, I'll probably try Hargreaves Landsdown first, since they generally seem to work harder on quotes than TD Direct.

[rivaldo] 04/4/2012 20:52

Jonwig, great to see you! A pleasure to have another contributor here.

I think HYG is pretty well run these days, perhaps better than in the past - their more recent investments are more sensible and less blue sky, keeping primarily to the medical equipment/diagnostics field, which can be pretty lucrative.

Most of their investments are maturing now from memory as they've held them for a while, so this is hopefully the stage that the "bottle-ageing" starts to reap rewards. DXS was a brilliant return for them and is still bringing in deferred consideration.

The NAV will also have been improved by the rise in EKF's and EHP's share prices since the year end. I think ODX has been stable/maybe a bit down from memory? As for the unquoteds, who knows? I haven't had time to Google their news flow.

SCLP is on a roll due to a tip from Galvan, and that roll may continue for a while yet.

If SCLP and/or another company becomes a winner then the £3.6m m/cap will look like peanuts. So as usual it all depends on whether investors have got the patience to hold tight etc etc......

Freehand 2010 is interesting. It ceased to be last year (can't remember whether administration/liquidation/whatever), but the HYG management basically rescued it themselves because they thought it was a great business (razor blade selling model etc). It's likely imo that HYG got 34% of this very cheaply, i.e in distressed circumstances.

Don't know about the spread, but as you know you can often deal well inside the published spread of any share.

[jonwig] 04/4/2012 20:12

Hi, rivaldo.

This looks interesting, doesn't it!
I see they are pursuing realisations but don't want a winding-up motion. That looks sensible to me, as these investments need a bit of bottle-ageing by the looks of it.
A 5p annual divi should keep things going - I don't forsee any problem in getting the share premium account sorted.

I'll cross-check your NAV calculations in post #11 - not that I disbelieve you, of course. Are there possibly any adverse movements elsewhere in the portfolio which might shave off the 86p figure?

They don't seem to have done any share buybacks: this worked wonders with MIG1 for a while, which I was able to profit from by adding in the secondary market.

Anyway, I'll come back next week with any more queries. I see trades are very rare here: is 42-46 a typical 'real' quote for about 5,000 shares?

[rivaldo] 04/4/2012 19:45

Scancell (SCLP) is rocketing at present.

HYG have around 14.8m shares in SCLP, or around 7.6%. At the last Balance Sheet date of 31/12/11, HYG's holding was only worth £0.89m. Now it's worth £2.1m at SCLP's current 14.125p.

HYG's NAV at 31/12/11 was 70.6p. SCLP has added another £1.2m of NAV, or around 15p per share based on HYG's 8.12m shares in issue.

Total NAV is therefore now around 86p per share - almost double the current share price.

Each 1p added to SCLP's share price is worth roughly 2p onto HYG's NAV for reference.

[markt] 22/7/2011 17:44

Riv
any view on ILX ?

[markt] 28/6/2011 11:59

ILX results out and price up....

[markt] 01/6/2011 13:49

BTW
did you buy any CUP ?
turned out well in last few weeks......going up so quick I'm just gonna hold on and see what happens......

ILX....results soon

FTSE graph looks like a dbl top to me, what do you think ?

betting against the Euro (and Mr Borroso !!) looks low risk winner imo........(Greece.....lose, lose situation imo.....high risk that will effect Portugal and Ireland and other high debters....and affect bank share prices......etc etc)...and if they all cut back then could affect German economy since 60% exports to Europe.....trend is down...and I can't see it suddenly changing direction this summer (the saga has a long way to go I think, mega debt will take years to pay down).....especially if Greece has General Strikes next week....

[rivaldo] 26/5/2011 15:45

Markt, I'm bored with this! Either say what the stock is clearly and delete it after I say so or don't bother. There are more than enough stocks to research without a bloody treasure hunt being necessary :o)) I probably won't like it anyway...

[rivaldo] 26/5/2011 12:30

HYG did say last month:

"We will receive additional proceeds should DxS achieve further milestones, which would further confirm the success of the DxS deal to all parties."

So you never know!

HYG is frankly very, very illiquid and long-term. I got EIS relief etc when I invested, so overall with dividends I've not done too badly. With 75p NAV I suppose the discount to NAV is quite large now.

Mark, were you going to detail that other company on this thread?

[rivaldo] 30/10/2010 14:26

IMS camoe out yesterday - NAV is up to 82p, against a 62p share price.

Note that the additional sale proceeds on DxS are worth another 25p per share, which would take NAV above 107p....

Glad to see more funds being invested in EKF and Omega Diagnostics.



"Hygea vct plc ('the Company') presents its interim management statement for the period from 1 July 2010 to 28 October 2010. This constitutes the Company's
second interim management statement for the financial year ending 31 December
2010, as required by the UK Listing Authority's Disclosure and Transparency Rule 4.3. This statement has been prepared solely to provide additional information in order to meet the requirements of the Disclosure and Transparency Rules and should not be relied on by shareholders, or any other party, for any other purpose.

The unaudited net asset value per ordinary share and the number of shares in
issue at 30 September 2010 were 82.2p and 8,115,376 respectively (30 June 2010: 74.8p and 8,115,376 respectively). There were no shares held in Treasury at either date.

No shares have been issued or repurchased during the period.

At 30 September 2010, the Company's assets included its portfolio of unlisted
assets along with GBP831,369 in cash and GBP1,764,000 in AIM shares valued at
bid price.

During the three months ended 30 September 2010 the Company made a further
investment in Omega Diagnostics plc (GBP29,850). Following the disposal of DxS
Limited, the company received a further GBP331,200 additional consideration
during the period. The Company may become entitled to additional proceeds in
respect of the sale of DxS Limited up to GBP2 million, none of which has been
taken into account in the net asset value reported above.

During the period, Scancell plc has moved from being listed on PLUS to AIM and
the bid price had risen to 93p compared to our valuation at 30 June 2010 of 45p per share. In addition the value of Glide Pharmaceutical Technologies Limited has been written down to cost since the timescale to commercialisation has been extended whilst further underlying supporting data is generated. The value of Wound Solutions Limited has been written off in view of the current fundraising climate. Following the offer by EKF Diagnostics plc for Quotient Diagnostics Limited, the holding in Quotient Diagnostics Limited was exchanged in October 2010 for 947,219 shares in EKF Diagnostics plc."

[rivaldo] 20/9/2010 12:02

I see John Hustler (director) has just bought more shares in HYG - that's his fourth purchase of HYG shares in the last year....



"Director's Dealings

Hygea VCT plc announces that on 7 September 2010, AXA Self-Invested Pension Plan on behalf of Mr John Hustler, a director of the Company, purchased 7,500 ordinary shares at a cost of 60 pence per share. Mr Hustler is now interested in 102,500 ordinary shares, representing 1.26% per cent of the issued share capital of the Company."

[rivaldo] 20/8/2010 10:48

Scancell (SCLP) is at 95p now, and seems to be attracting some attention.

Article on Stockopedia:



In the FT on Wednesday:



"Clinical trials are now under way, and the Scancell vaccine will be treating 22 patients over the next three years. Richard Goodfellow, chief operating officer, says the plan is to sell the business to a big pharmaceutical company in the next three years."

Research from Objective Capital:

[rivaldo] 09/8/2010 14:28

At 31/12/19 HYG has 8.12m ordinary shares in issue. Each 1p added to SCLP's share price is worth roughly 1.5p onto HYG's NAV for reference.

HYG was launched as Bioscience VCT. After a terrible start its performance has improved to the point where returns are starting to look pretty decent (after taking EIS relief and dividends into account).

Future prospects look even brighter. The VCT has a big investment in two AIM-listed companies: Scancell, as well as Omega Diagnostics (ODX).

The NAV was 34.6p per share at 30th September 2019 per the RNS that day (8.1m shares in issue):



It's worth noting that buying and selling VCT shares on the open market is free of CGT (the converse being that losses are not offsettable).

Here's HYG's web site:



About them:

".....the emphasis should be on medical technology companies (eg devices, drug delivery systems, diagnostics etc) requiring much less capital than treatment development companies and with the potential to become profitable much more quickly than treatment development companies."

UPDATE at November'22

NAV is now well over 40p per share. HYG have £330,000 of cash,11m SCLP shares worth £3m at 24.75p, plus essentially 223,977 shares in Arecor worth £560,000 at 250p, plus £118k in Fuel 3D and £121k in Insense Ltd. There are 8.115m shares in issue.

EDIT - HYG now have 10m SCLP shares worth £1m at 10p, and 223,977 shares in Arecor (AREC). All other investments are essentially worthless.

[tuteratut] 17/1/2005 19:21

rockbottomone
its done and dusted.

[rockbottomone] 17/1/2005 17:54

No, the offer has not yet been accepted by Honeygroves shareholders?

[cvolbrac] 22/12/2004 13:10

Too late rocky, the offer is now unconditional!

[rockbottomone] 22/12/2004 12:59

With Oakdenes dipping share price, the offer gets worse and worse - REJECT!

[charlie] 11/12/2004 12:17

Page 93 of offer document, investors in RAB Capital plc may be interested to note that Philip Richards took 1m shares and 1m warrants at 10p for his personal account when the Honeygrove shares & warrants were placed with RAB funds. Hasn't done him much good on this occasion, and there are probably both pros and cons of such "co-investment" in the more general case. But are RAB Capital investors aware that it goes on?

[charlie] 11/12/2004 11:06

Page 9 of the offer document dated 27 November includes the following text which was omitted from the RNS announcement on 25 November. Why was it omitted? Is it because the total market value of £15m for three sites (presumably includng Swaylands) appears wholly inconsistent with the alleged previous offer of £14m for Swaylands?

"Oakdene is proposing to refinance its existing debt and that of Honeygrove, and has negotiated a new £40m revolving credit facility to be made available by National Westminster Bank plc with the Royal Bank of Scotland plc acting as agent. Oakdene's gearing will not rise significantly in the short term, and will fall within 6 to 9 months of the acquisition of Honeygrove, as it is intended that Honeygrove sites with a total market value of around £15m (2 of which are outside Oakdene's area of operation) will be sold."