Ip Share Discussion Threads

[brucie5] 03/8/2020 09:05

Andiamo!
At least PART of the news we've been waiting for.

[pierre oreilly] 03/8/2020 08:56

Other pharmas like nano have doubled and tripled in a day on similar - but not as concrete - news.

If notionally nano has done the same, that's between £200m and £400m extra nano asset value for ipo.

Maybe this will kick start a decent rerating of ipo, especially as there's a podcast or something or other to come imminently to spread interest.

I hope the nano float plans are nearing fruition.

[bobsworth] 03/8/2020 08:22

Blimey!

BBC Quote

"Almost half a million of the new rapid swab tests, called LamPORE, will be available from next week in adult care settings and laboratories, with millions more due to be rolled out later in the year.

Additionally, thousands of DNA test machines, which have already been used in eight London hospitals and can analyse nose swabs, will be rolled out across NHS hospitals from September.

Around 5,000 machines will provide 5.8 million tests in the coming months, the Department for Health said."

[bamboo2] 03/8/2020 08:12

Dex, Dex, wake up, time to make a decision! :o)

[bamboo2] 03/8/2020 07:58

IP Group plc - Portfolio company Oxford Nanopore Technologies partners with UK Government to roll out LamPORE, a new generation of COVID-19 test

-- Ground-breaking British technology will initially provide hundreds of thousands of fast, accurate, low-cost COVID-19 tests under new agreement with the UK Government, with the potential to build to millions of tests per month. Results can be obtained in under two hours.

IP Group plc (LSE: IPO) ("IP Group" or "the Group" or "the Company"), the developer of intellectual property-based businesses, notes that its portfolio company Oxford Nanopore Technologies Limited ("Oxford Nanopore"), has announced an agreement with the UK's Department of Health and Social Care, to roll out its novel LamPORE test. This will support the UK's efforts to manage the continued reduction of COVID-19 and containment of new cases, now and through the winter cold and flu season.

Under the agreement, an initial 450k LamPORE SARS-CoV-2 tests will be made available for use by a number of NHS testing laboratories. As well as providing a large number of tests for existing labs, the programme will help the UK to understand the different use cases for the technology, for example the potential asymptomatic screening of frontline staff.

Alan Aubrey, Chief Executive of IP Group , said: "The roll-out of LamPORE, the company's first diagnostic assay, is a significant development for Oxford Nanopore and in the battle against COVID-19 in the UK. We are proud that Oxford Nanopore has been supplying countries all over the world with sequencing capability throughout this pandemic to help support the response to the crisis."

Since the first emergence of the virus, Oxford Nanopore's rapid, portable sequencing technology has been used extensively for COVID-19 epidemiology and scientific research.

IP Group holds an undiluted beneficial stake of 15.8% in Oxford Nanopore Technologies

[r9505571] 03/8/2020 07:26

IP Group holds an undiluted beneficial stake of 15.8% in Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

[r9505571] 03/8/2020 07:26

This is huge!

[ayl30] 03/8/2020 04:33

Oxford Nanoporehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53632043

[p1nkfish] 02/8/2020 21:45

See notes 1 & 15 in last annual report also for info on valuation methods.

"Other valuation methods include: market-derived valuations adjusted to reflect considerations including (inter alia) technical measures, financial measures and market and sales measures; discounted cash flows and price-earnings multiples.
The Group engages third party valuation specialists to provide valuation support
where required; during 2019 we commissioned third party valuations on ten out of
the top 20 holdings in respect of our half-yearly or full year reporting (2018: five)."

[empoggio] 02/8/2020 21:14

This company has been riding on the MC and the NAV. As a result, the share price has an intrinsic 40_60% cash. And in the last NAV figures. over With IPO80% discount. Absolutely ridiculous, yes.
When you buy gold, there are no dividends, no care for profit forecasts, etc...all one is waiting for is the price of the underlying holding of GOLD'. Simple, really.
Yet, here we have a company where the NAV is about +80% of the MC; and say 30% of that NAV is cash.
PI's are confused at all of this: is it a 'paper commodity'; is it an investment fund; is it a venture capital company, etc, ...?
Many PI's look to invest in a company that simply produces (or has the potential for) profits, Subsequently, these profits will be invested to make the company larger (and more profitable) and ultimately the PI will get his share of these profits via a dividend. Simple, really.
With IPO over the years, it has vbeen at a stalemate of good investments, vs bad, vs super-good ones. Profits, dividends etc. have not become part of the equation, and yet, for the PI it has been at the heart of the investment.
But now, we have a new team, with a different outlook. They have some clear ideas on what (level) of investment in what; and when to satisfy the original investment, and the understanding that 'cash is king' in certain circumsyances, be it for safety, or for growth OR FOR UNDERSTANDING THE LOYALTY AND STAYING POWER of PI's, and maybe some II's.
Wednesday will tell us if there has been a real change in tack by the BoD, or that we are still in the doldrums concerning the objectives of the company and their interest in its investors.

[bamboo2] 02/8/2020 21:03

Pierre, you regularly misunderstand me, and this seems another case!

I am not confused about Mcap and nav. Mcap is currently £710m

Nav is plucked out of the ether by IPO and is not subject to independent validation. For example ONT is on the books for £30m more than my estimate.

I am saying that the other parts of the co, represented by the balance, are probably very undervalued,.

Despite us saying the same thing in different ways, I reckon it's probably best to agree to differ.

[pierre oreilly] 02/8/2020 20:26

I don't think it is straightforward - I think you are assuming the mkt cap is the same as the nav.

The value of ont is (using your numbers) £241m. The market values that at £120 (approx)

The value of the cash is £310 (ditto). The market values it at about £155m

The value of the listed companies is 87m (seems v low to me, even after disposals), the market values those at £43m

Likewise, the unquoted are valued at half their book value.

No idea why you think the market values everything at 100%, except the unquoted stakes. That is the implication of what you typed.

Basically, the market is valuing everything at half its underlying (for quoted) or assessed (for unquoted) real value.

[bamboo2] 02/8/2020 20:07

Pierre, since the question of the value of all the listed co's has come up a few times in the past, I thought I'd work it out. I have added the value of ONT and cash. This gives an idea of the value the market currently assigns to all the rest of the companies, Parkwalk etc. Pretty straight forward really.

£241m ONT [16.4%] [Based on above article]
£310m Cash [Best guess of cash at hand]
£ 87m Listed co's [Current mcap multiplied by holding percentage]

£638m Total

£710m Current mcap IP Group

£ 72m Balance

[p1nkfish] 02/8/2020 15:20

Risk on and small cap in the limelight this benefits else it's "who cares?".

How does IPO prove relevance given its mandate, holdings, purpose? Right now ' "who cares".

I'm wondering if these type of companies are better split up as it may just be so big in terms of number of holdings its a case of the law of diminishing returns. None outside a very few holdings make much difference - a bit like a sentiment driven etf.

[p1nkfish] 02/8/2020 15:16

Discount to NAV is high. Sentiment is a drag. Market conditions etc. If the did a tender offer with some of the cash to reduce float plus a decent exit or 2 it would garner attention and help reduce the gap.

Rest of cash needs care, obviously.

I'm wondering if these type of companies are better split up as it may just be so big in terms of number of holdings its a case of the law of diminishing returns. None outside a very few holdings make much difference - a bit like a sentiment driven etf.

[pierre oreilly] 02/8/2020 14:27

Don't understand.

You seem to be assuming that the value of all its holdings equals the mkt cap.

The whole point about ipo is that the mkt cap is something like 1/2 or less of the value of it's holdings plus cash.

[bamboo2] 02/8/2020 14:07

Pierre, the £72m is for all the unquoted stocks.

[pierre oreilly] 02/8/2020 13:10

Oxford sciences £56m, Featurespace £30m - at least according to a spreadsheet i started to develop last year, now abandoned so may be out of date.

[pierre oreilly] 02/8/2020 13:04

Are you valuing all unquoted ones at 0?

Istesso for example is unquoted but ipo's 57%holding was valued at the £82m last year.

Plus there are, literally, hundreds more (many of which will end up worthless, but a few will make it big and float).

[bamboo2] 02/8/2020 10:44

I did a basic calc of the current worth of the co.

£241m ONT [16.4%] [Based on above article]
£310m Cash [Best guess of cash at hand]
£ 87m Listed co's [Current mcap multiplied by holding percentage]

£638m Total

£710m Current mcap IP Group

£ 72m Balance

Comments and/or corrections welcomed.

[bamboo2] 01/8/2020 18:27

This article suggests 16% of ONT is worth £240m



Michael Molinari is the unicorn hunter.

Every year he gets a first look at up to 1000 "invention disclosures" coming out of the research laboratories of Australia's group of eight universities.

Molinari picks the best ideas and then applies the collective wisdom of IP Group Plc, an intellectual property commercialisation company established 20 years ago at Oxford University.

He can help academics build the frameworks for commercial success, including the right corporate structure, the right mix of executives and the capital to fund growth. Ideally, this ultimately results in the creation of a unicorn, which is defined as a tech company worth $1 billion.

This level of wealth creation does not happen overnight. But IP Group has a good track record.

Molinari, who gained his PhD in biomedical engineering at Oxford University, says one of the IP Group's great successes in the UK is a life sciences start-up called Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

"They have developed portable DNA sequences," he says. "The analogy that they use is that today's sequencing technologies use the mainframe computer, and there's is a mobile phone.

"Actually their smallest format DNA sequencer is smaller than an iPhone and you can plug it into your USB port and sequence anything anywhere.

"It's now being used around the world by governments for genomic surveillance of COVID-19 and there are a number of groups in Australia using the technology."

Oxford Nanopore was spun out of the Oxford University chemistry department in late 2005, and is based on research by Professor Hagan Bayley into the protein core on a cell.

"You can manipulate that so that if a molecule passes through, it detects with a lot of sensitivity and specificity what that molecule is," Molinari says.

Good progress
IP Group has invested £50 million in the company since it was launched in 2013. It has raised a total of £400 million and is valued about £1.5 billion ($2.7 billion).

In Australia, IP Group has committed to invest about $200 million over 10 years. Molinari says the progress so far has been good, with many promising companies in the portfolio.

"Over the last couple of years we've been starting to build out that early portfolio in Australia and that will hopefully grow into companies like Oxford Nanopore over the next five-, 10-plus years," he says.

IP Group in Australia sources its inventions from the following eight institutions: University of Adelaide, Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, Monash University, University of NSW, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia.

And these are the top eight IP Group investments in Australia: CyAmast, a cyber security company (UNSW); RAGE Biotech, a life sciences company (Monash, UWA, Murdoch and the Baker Institute); Canopus Networks uses machine learning to shape traffic flows in telecommunications networks (UNSW); Kira Biotech is developing therapies for challenging immune system disorders (Co-operative Research Centre); Additive Assurance provides quality assurance for 3D-printed metal parts (Monash); AMSL Aero is building an all-electric vertical take off and landing aircraft (University of Sydney); Growave uses microwaves to kill weeds (University of Melbourne).

Molinari says IP Group, more often than not, is investing on its own in the early stages of a new company. It then brings in partners to provide more capital because deep technology companies require a lot of capital to get through to maturity.

[bamboo2] 01/8/2020 18:22

Nick Loman is Professor of Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics in the Institute of Microbiology and Infection, and since March has been leading the team at the University of Birmingham who are part of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium. Here, he explains how this team is working in the lab to help us understand the spread of COVID-19. “The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium was conceived at a meeting in March 2020 with the aim of putting the UK at the front of the genomics effort for SARS-CoV-2. Soon afterwards, the consortium was awarded a £20m grant from UKRI and the Wellcome Trust to set up a network of regional sequencing centres, and distributed analysis capacity.

“The University of Birmingham is contributing in a number of ways to this effort which has so far resulted in over 40,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes being sequenced in the UK: well over 50% of the entire effort.

“One reason we were so quick off the blocks in the UK was because of the rapid design of a sequencing protocol for SARS-CoV-2 by Dr Josh Quick (UKRI Future Leaders Fellow), which was posted online in late January 2020 as part of the ARTIC Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award project. Compatible with both nanopore and Illumina sequencing, this is by far the most popular sequencing protocol for SARS-CoV-2 and has been used across four continents. Josh has spent the past months optimising this protocol to reduce the costs and increase the performance, as well as sending out primers. Dr Will Rowe (PDRA) has helped develop a bioinformatics pipeline for the reliable processing of these datasets into consensus sequences.

“In Birmingham, we have settled into a routine for sequencing local samples: we regularly receive inactivated samples from Dr Anna Casey at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, from Dr Husam Osman and Dr Andrew Bosworth at Heartlands Hospital, and from Dr Fenella Halstead in Hereford. These samples are passed to Dr Claire McMurray (PDRA) who extracts them and performs the sequencing PCR.

“The amplicons are passed to Dr Jo Stockton (PDRA) who prepares nanopore libraries and puts them on the GridION for rapid sequencing. We are able to perform this process in under 24 hours if we need to investigate an outbreak rapidly: apart from hospitals and care homes, we are now receiving samples from factories.

“The GridION data goes straight into CLIMB (the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics), along with all the other COG-UK data, thanks to Radoslaw Poplawski (CLIMB Cloud Manager) who keeps this all running. Over this time, he has provided a new rack of hundreds of terabytes of fast SSD storage specifically for the COG-UK project working over the lock-down. The data is managed by a bespoke metadata system called Majora, written by Dr Sam Nicholls (PDRA), which tracks all the sequence data and uploads it to public databases on a weekly basis. Sam created “metadata Friday” – a crunch point in the week where the entire consortium data is processed according to a strict deadline. The trees and analysis can be seen on our website (www.cogconsortium.uk) and we feed back real-time phylogenetics information to the diagnostic labs and public health agencies to identify new clusters for investigation.

[bamboo2] 01/8/2020 17:54

Additive Assurance raises $1.6M, announces partnership with Defence and appoints industry expert to Board

Completed $1.6M funding round led by IP Group

Appointed Jürgen Schneider, former Siemens Australia Head of Market Development, as an independent non-executive director

Completed sale of the first unit to DST Group - Australian Department of Defence

Additive Assurance, the provider of world-leading quality assurance solutions for additive manufacturing, announced that it closed a $1.6M funding round led by IP Group. This funding will support a significant expansion of Additive Assurance’s team, following on from an Accelerating Commercialisation project and a successful customer evaluation program with several leading manufacturers.

Additive Assurance has developed a unique quality assurance technology for metal additive manufacturing (3D printing). The technique allows manufacturers to ensure the structural integrity of components as they are being made and correct for anomalies when they occur. This allows 3D printing to be used in performance critical industries such as aerospace and medical devices, drastically reducing the cost of component certification, and enabling manufacturing at the location of need. “In this time of COVID-19, the need for robust supply chains has never been more important,” said Michael Molinari, Managing Director of IP Group Australia. “Additive Assurance has developed a technology that unlocks the potential of metal 3D printing, and we’re excited to be supporting their growth.”

Alongside the investment, Additive Assurance has appointed Jürgen Schneider as a non-executive director. Mr Schneider brings extensive expertise to the board from his previous role as Head of Market Development at Siemens Australia, among several other leadership roles. “Enabling technologies such as Additive Assurance’s QA solution will allow industry to build sovereign manufacturing capacity,” said Mr Schneider. “I look forward to working with the team to bring their unique product to market.”

Engaging with the Defence and Aerospace sector, Additive Assurance is pleased to announce the recent sale of a pre-production system to the Defence Science and Technology Group, Australian Department of Defence. “We’re delighted to be working with the DST Group,” said Marten Jurg Additive Assurance CEO. “DST is pushing the boundaries of advanced manufacturing and we are pleased to be a part of that mission.”

About Additive Assurance
Additive Assurance is a spin-out of Monash University, Australia, specialising in quality assurance for metal additive manufacturing. Founded by Marten Jurg and Andrey Molotnikov in 2019, the company is the culmination of many years of research. The unique method of quality assurance for additive manufacturing is being rolled out across multiple industries, including aerospace, medical devices, energy, and defence. See for more information.

[brucie5] 01/8/2020 13:55

I hold these, but without very much enthusiasm. In truth I have done far better by buying some of the underlying holdings, and if I could buy Nanopore, I certainly would. The place where it might become a much more interesting situation is as/when/if the market tanks and the share price moves down to the historic 40p support. With huge cash balance and discount to NAV, that would be a great opportunity to buy what is effectively, an investment trust. But NAI, DYOR.

[bamboo2] 31/7/2020 21:20

cord, There aren't that many co's in the portfolio that are listed, so it's difficult to calculate fair valuations.

Many of the listed flatliners have been either sold or re-born/re-financed over the last year to eighteen months. Much of the burden of re-financing has been shouldered by other II's rather than IP Group. Management style has changed since the buyout of Parkwalk. IPO is happy to do business, where there is a willing buyer. Smaller biomed holds are being reduced. See post 1 for more details of the listed holdings.

Showing a profit at the end of the year would be a positive for the share price