Kcom Share Discussion Threads

[lord gnome] 30/5/2017 14:38

Seems to be making slow but steady progress since those large trades went through. Hopefully a sign of better times to come.

[solarno lopez] 26/5/2017 07:53

The fourth characteristic would suggest they are an activist fund similar to Crystal Amber in the UK.

[salchow] 25/5/2017 11:36

I see that PrimeStone Capital have been increasing their holding to a serious level and have now gone up to 43.5M shares.

Looking at their website they say that:

"PrimeStone primarily invests in a limited number of European companies that exhibit four characteristics:

They have a solid core business
They are trading at a significant discount to their potential value
This discount can be reduced over time by working on multiple levers
PrimeStone believes their management and board to be open-minded and willing to engage in a constructive dialogue to create long term value"

Hopefully, this augurs well for the future!

[rcturner2] 23/5/2017 09:53

I have bought back in again this am.

Last time I went from 80p to 120p, hoping for something similar this time.

[lord gnome] 22/5/2017 17:11

Hopefully an overhang is being cleared. If so, and if the up coming numbers are half decent, we should be north of £1 in short order. I don't see the divi being pruned just yet.

[toffeeman] 22/5/2017 15:59

Largest daily volume for 6 years - no idea of the implication :)

[grahamite2] 22/5/2017 15:47

Still very interesting - but knowing it's a year old is surely relevant. Thanks Skinny.

[skinny] 22/5/2017 15:30

July 2016.

[grahamite2] 22/5/2017 14:14

A date or link might be helpful.

[gretel1921] 22/5/2017 13:53

Septimus,this might be of interest:



KCOM's expansion continues



What a transformation it’s been over the past few years for KCom Group PLC (LON:KCOM). Since the onset of the global financial crisis the one-time Kingston Communications has changed its name, its strategy and even the nature of the infrastructure portfolio it owns. The result? – from a share price low of less than 12p hit in the doldrums of the 2008 bear market, the shares are now riding high at just over 110p, an increase of around 90%.

Interestingly, 2008 was also the year that Bill Halbert moved over from a role as independent director and into the chief executive’s role.

He describes the transformation the company has undergone in straightforward enough terms. “The business was originally a fixed-line telephony business,” he says. By a series of historical accidents it had managed to stay outside of the purview of British Telecom and was instead floated on the London Stock Exchange by Hull City Council during the dotcom boom.

It then had to adapt itself to the rapidly changing world of the internet, which it did with mixed success.

“What it then did,” continues Halbert, “was attempt to move up the value chain. That’s an undertaking very few companies succeeded in, but when I joined in 2006 that was what it had tried to do – it had created a national network and made a raft of IT acquisitions.”

Then came the financial crisis. “By the time we got to 2007 and 2008 we were deep into slowdown,” says Halbert. “Lehman Brothers was our biggest customer. The business was in a bit of a crisis and there was a need in larger terms to figure out just what should this business be?”

Then came the key realisation. “What was clear was that it should not be a telco,” says Halbert.

“And happily when you looked at the various assets within KCOM you could see that there was a set of capabilities that if you could put them together would put the company in the right place – into IP and cloud-based services.”

The aspiration that KCOM would be the owner and operator of a national telecoms network was abandoned. The traffic on the KCOM network was made over to BT in what at the time was the biggest wholesale deal BT had ever done.

Subsequently, a buyer then came in for the network itself in the shape of CityFibre, which offered £90 mln in an all-cash deal. With a little bit of a boost from subsequent trading, that transaction has allowed KCOM to clear all of its debt and to emerge at the end of the financial year to March 2016 with net cash of £7.4 mln.

The business which has emerged has two strands. There’s the remaining internet service provider type business centred around Hull and, more broadly, Yorkshire. Significant investment in new fibre-optic capabilities here is ongoing.

And there’s the cloud-based system integration business, in which KCOM is partnered with industry giants like Cisco, Amazon and Microsoft.

Here, Halbert offers a key business insight. “It’s all very well,” he says, “automating systems and processes inside big companies. That can result in significant cost savings and be a useful exercise in itself. “But you can only create value,” he says, “by interacting.”

So, for example, cloud-based contact centre solutions are offered to HMRC in one of KCOM’s biggest ever contract wins, that allow HMRC to communicate with massively increased volumes of callers at peak times in the tax year.

“Our vision,” concludes Halbert, “is to create an asset-light, IP cloud-based company that will be a new world disruptive challenger to the big IT and systems integration companies. And the market is just waking up to us as an organisation to watch.”





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[grahamite2] 22/5/2017 13:53

8 posts in a day! I thought it must have broken the £1 mark or something.

[dogwalker] 22/5/2017 13:29

Now the 9 million shares have been sold. Maybe they're different ones!

[raysor] 22/5/2017 12:54

Septimus, I think it was the fact that their legacy business was shrinking much faster than anticipated and their new business was growing slower than ecxpected

[grahamburn] 22/5/2017 11:28

Well, that RNS explains one of the 4.5m purchases.

[septimus quaid] 22/5/2017 10:28

Majority of the trades are automatic.

Hoovering anything up that becomes available?

[rcturner2] 22/5/2017 10:14

SQ - I suspect it was the interim results on 29 November.

[cityconindex] 22/5/2017 10:01

9 mln shares they know something, divi prob not going to be pruned and if their is no gov golden share, could put kcom in play...wont take much buying some brokers are rec to 150 per share..

[septimus quaid] 22/5/2017 09:42

I hold these but do not study them much (probably because I'm in profit and they pay a steady away dividend) but can anybody just provide a quick reminder of what happened last Nov/Dec to cause such a (seemingly permanent?) fall in value?

Current yield looks a tad high at 6.5% (with last year's divi only covered by a small margin, x1.28).

Presume divi is not sustainable and is due a pruning?

Interim results coming up in a couple of weeks (02/06/17)

[dogwalker] 22/5/2017 09:33

Interesting large-scale purchases this morning..... 9 million shares , plus.

[skinny] 11/5/2017 12:57

Looking better.

[toffeeman] 11/5/2017 12:57

Needs to break 95 and retest and then establish that as support.

[grahamite2] 11/5/2017 10:00

Results not until June 6 I think. It would be nice to see some of the big fall at the end of last year recovered, but with this dividend I could live with it if the price stayed flat.

[cityconindex] 11/5/2017 09:46

Seems there is some modest buying to make the MM move KCOM forward, if they produce some modest increase when their figures are released it may be very positive. The MM know this and want to spoil the party seem your point warranty about the dividend is making an impact..