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Disastrous 10K.
I don't know a lot about the management team at RedHill, but "deputy" CEO doesn't sound like it's too critical. As a founder, I'm sure he has a vested interest (emotionally, and financially) in the success of the company.
As with any biotech company,it's mostly the science that will dictate the success. RedHill has a lot of things going on right now, and my guess is that Mr. Shilo simply knows that his departure doesn't alter the prospects of the company at all.
I still feel like this is one of the most undervalued biotech stocks out there, given their pipeline. I'm holding my position in its entirety, and looking forward to developments over the next 12-24 months.
Interesting to see what this newly announced competition will produce:
http://carbon.xprize.org/
There are several companies already doing this, such as Mantra, but the X-Prize competition should generate even more interest and is a sign of increasing awareness that carbon can and should be seen "as a resource, not a liability" as the description states.
Can a publicly-traded company compete?
I hope you're right. But surely nobody doubted that this certification would be granted, in which case... the share price should have already factored that in.
Maybe this company just needs to break even (cash flow) to attract an entirely new set of eyes.
I hope Q3 was not flat from Q2. But if it was, I hope to see a larger backlog and I'm still hoping to hear about more partners/licencees.
Wow. Again, just more proof that having good science and IP is woefully insufficient to be a success. You need to know how to run a company. Seems Mantra needs some help there.
Granted, but if there is an expectation by the market (legitimate or perceived) that an update is overdue, the company could minimally release a letter to shareholders. No 8k, no PR, just an FYI. It can go a long way in maintaining shareholder trust through tranparency.
In most cases on the OTC (in my experience anyway), no news is bad news.
I feel worse for a shareholder down even 1/1000th of what the CEO's paper losses are. CEO knows everything about what's happening at the company, and what is not. Shareholders should be kept informed, so as to make decisions about their invested position. No news is not 'better' than bad news, in my book. Management of public have a responsibility to release information (or just updates) that may be viewed as negative, since the sooner it's public knowledge, the less damage it can do to the share price (and in-turn to shareholders).
Other than the keychain-ornament scooter demo they released a while back, there has been precious little information disclosed by the company about their progress (or lack thereof).
I could have sworn that somebody posted a while back how it was such a resounding endorsement that she would join Mantra in the first place. If indeed it was, then her departure must be equally telling.
But it can be spun to look like it's no big deal. After all, who stays with a company on the brink of changing the FC world and ridding our atmosphere of polluting CO2?
The CEO doesn't "let" share price drops happen, except as a result of not having moved the company forward on any fronts. Clearly, the market thinks the prospects are dim at this stage, as there is no encouraging news on either the ERC or the MRFC fronts.
That could still change, but typically share price will move in some direction a little ahead of public information, and then more after it.
Does somebody know something?
Now for a mere $16k I can get 1% of the company and join the 1%-er party Larry will throw! Cool.
Fair enough, and for the record I do understand that his enthusiasm is genuine, and that his knowledge of the subject matter and his ties to the company certainly help sustain his enthusiasm.
I just don't like arrogant posts about how dumb all of us are for not seeing how much money you can make by investing in Mantra, when it's all complete speculation.
If a true long cannot engage in a decent conversation about the unknowns, threats, and risks to the investment, then he/she lacks objectivity.
Indeed, that's not the same as blatant pumping, but it's not far either.
IMO
Yes, that is my understanding too. Gexpro also (I believe) will pay for the installation of a peak-shaving system, so the business hosting the setup has zero out-of-pocket expenses (but does share in some of the cost savings).
Access to that kind of financing by the integrators is what has accelerated the adoption so dramatically. After all, who would say no to saving money, with no money down?
"just to have the topic move on to the next perceived non issue with MVTG"
I believe I have spelled out quite specifically what my personal "issues" with MVTG are. I'm not trying to stir up anything, just trying to have an objective, fact-based (and preferably figures-backed), discussion about the prospects of investing in this company, free of emotion. You are unable to do that, but you don't recognize it.
I've been in your shoes before, and in my case I got creamed. I hope you don't suffer the same fate.
But one thing is for certain.. today the market seems to share my perception about what you deem "non issues" about this company and it's viability as a real business.
I do. Alstom is huge, and this cost is likely just a footnote in their ledger of R&D expenses on things like CO2 reduction from their operations.
I contacted LaFarge a while back to ask about the ERC initiative in BC, and was told that it was just one of many initiatives the company has going on internally to capture or reduce the CO2 from their plants.
Yes, on this point, we agree. It would appear undervalued, at least compared to what the company seems to be worth stwearding these 2 technologies (MFRC and ERC).
In your last 2 posts, the only time you come close to citing numbers, is when you said "The last data I saw projected 2-3 year ROIs based on the power costs to run the Formic acid ERCs."
Pray tell, where did you "see" those numbers?
As for guessing (because that's all you've done here) relative costs to "Detroit engines", it's not helpful. You'll need to compare them to H-based FC's, and you'll need to do better than guess, if you want to convince a new wave of shareholders to help prop-up the SP.
Again, I agree that the science (and materials benefits) looks like they will be cost advantages over membrane-based FCs, but until there is a full-scale production line it's guestimation on your part (and even on Larry's).
You touched directly on my main point. The IP and the science looks great, no doubt. But patents contain precisely zero practical information about commercialization and opeartional costs, strategies, or opportunities.
Reading the patents will not tell me how much an ERC plant will cost to build, nor what the OpEx cost to capture the CO2 and convert it to formic salts will be. Nor will it tell me what the commercial value of the product is or could be in the future.
My past posts sound very critical, but to be clear.. I'm not critical of the company and their tech, I'm curious about it and want to know more. I'm critical of the one-sided posts making bold claims about how huge a financial success Mantra will be.
My personal approach in investing in microcaps (MVTG is virtually a nanocap at $5m today), is that I first have to believe in the science/tech/IP, and the future need for it (markets, trends). In those respects, Mantra seems to have the goods. But next I look at the numbers ... if the company provides some, I will validate as best I can myself. If they don't I will try to make up my own mind, and often contact the company to validate what I'm saying.
If the numbers look great, then there is the company management, their go-to-market strategy, the market readiness, timing, social/economic/environmental/legistlative/political factors that can help or hinder.
With Mantra, I'm stuck on the numbers. Mind you, I haven't spend much time on it.. I figured with a few key longs here this ananlysis would surely have been done already (I must revisit Gantor50's swing at this, which was shared on this board).
Ecomike, you who are close to the company, if you have some insight into the numbers, and you are keen on convincing investors to jump aboard, your time would be better spent, IMO, sharing that info, rather than what I find to be fist-pumping in the air.
Twice in the past I have taken a small speculative position in MVTG, but twice I closed it. The PPS today is tempting me to reconsider.
So do you have any quantitative analysis of ERC to share with the board? Hard to imagine you bought up 1% of shares of the company without having done that much.
Your arguments would have sooo much more merit to them, if you had something to back them up.
ERC is a great idea. MFRC is also a great idea. It's just too early to tell if they will be successful commercially, as there is not sufficient information available about their performance, costs, manufacture, reliability, and profitability.
Ecomike,
There are two aspects of the H-based FC sector that you seem to be unaware of.
Firstly, you're stuck in the 90's.. H2 can be produced with 100% solar power and water (even saline). Yes in the past H2 was produced from fossil gasses, but that is way old information -- the technology is here today to make clean H2, and to make it profitably.
Secondly, H2 gas tank safety is no more of a concern than other fuel sources. Your example of two H2 FC cars driving into one another head-on at 60mph is ridiculous. I think the outcome would not be so different with two petrol engine cars, and possible even 2 battery electric cars.
In addition to that, there is a UK company that builds H2-based FC's (albeit on a different scale than the likes of Ballard, Hydrogenics, Plug, FuelCell, etc.) where the Hydrogen is stored in a solid (powder) format. Safety (and density) problem solved. Imagine what 10 more years of R&D will bring.
Hydrogen will have it's place in the energy storage mix of the future. No doubt about it.
You can't get rid of Carbon. The amount in the ground & air has been constant for billions of years. You can only change its form.
It's widely accepted that carbon in the form of CO2 in our atmosphere is bad (above 350ppm, anyway) for the planet. CO2 in gaseous or liquid state sequestered elsewhere is also (IMO) not a good enough solution.
But carbon in solid form, will surely have commercial value and NOT pose a problem to store/sequester, nor does it risk getting back into out atmosphere (well, that depends on how it's used, of course).
Carbon-sequestration is the wrong term.. it should be called Carbon-dioxide sequestration, and yes.. it's dumb. But carbon in the form of a valuable solid (either pure, or in some other carbon-containing solid powder, pellets, salts, etc.) is a GREAT way to deal with C in our air. If it can be extracted from air to produce a solid C-based product, and done profitably, we have a major major game changer on our hands and maybe just maybe I will stop telling my kids that their grandkids may be touring Wall St. on a glass bottom boat.
Indeed, if CarbonEngineering can't create a valuable C-based product from their process, then they may well want to see if they can adapt their C-absorbing machines to produce other products (such as Mantra's formic salt process).
Impressive line-up of speakers at this event! A veritable who's who of pharma and research institutions. This is great, and it speaks to the authority Dr. Menon and validity of CTIX's science on the subject.
(But they need a better head shot of Dr. Menon.. LOL)
The fact that you read that article so fast and didn't even catch the enormous mistake in it, speaks volumes to how seriously you're taking this discussion.
1 million tonnes of C02 per day = 1 billion kg
A normal car emits about 5 tonnes per year of C02. That's about 14kg per day
How may times does 14 go into 1 billion?
The answer is not 100, as the bonehead author of the article indicated.
Another article has the "full scale" plant offsetting 300,000 cars, implying an annual CO2 capture rate of 1.5 million tonnes. A far cry from the 1 million tonnes per DAY of the first article we discussed.
But I digress. A fruitful discussion would be to compare: what are the metrics (projections or actual observations) for Mantra's ERC? Of one thing we're sure: it cannot extract more CO2 per day than the industrial source it's coupled-to, emits. So we're left comparing CapEx for an ERC retro-fit of an industrial source, and OpEx to create the formic salts from CO2 ($/kg). And of course the commercial value of the salts themselves.
Any Mantra shareholders happen to know these numbers?
From: http://www.ballard.com/files/PDF/Investors/Presentations/BLD_Investor_Analyst_Day_Presentation.pdf
$75m in US military contracts
300 buses in China on order
Clients include Boeing, Lockheed, US Navy
For material handling, Ballard has deployed almost 10,000 stacks, representing over 100 million hours of in-the-field operations.
For telecom backup, some single stacks have run over 20,000 hours without failure during hurricanes. Again, that's not lab data, that's field data, from deployments in over 25 countries.
What has MRFC proven that can possibly compare?
Ballard has 50 testing stations that run 24x7 with diagnostic tools. They have a roll-to-roll manufacturing process in place. What does Mantra have?
Before you go pounding your chest about how good Mantra's MRFCs are, you should have something a little more concrete to base it on, than hope alone.
MRFCs are potentially capable of all the things membrane-based FCs do today, but they still lack the decades of maturity and proof of capacity and reliability of the incumbent technology.
You said:
Ballard has had an EBITDA positive quarter or two recently, and would be profitable if they weren't still investing in long-term growth.
Old doesn't mean obsolete, just mature. As in millions of hours of in-the-field experience and proven reliability. Something MFRC's won't have for quite some time.
MRFC's and flow batteries surely have their place, and possibly even a bright future. But to continue to blanket bad-mouth any company or technology that competes with Mantra's ERC or MRFC is just going to reduce your credibility on this board as an objective long.
Please, do go on, wise one.
Enlighten us please. What is the cost to blow 200x more air into the system than a chimney at a cement plan emits?
Humour us and explain, please, and using simple words for we laymen, why the claims the company is making are fraudulent and thermodynamically impossible?
And if it please you, do tell what Mantra's capital costs and operating costs are to capture carbon from cement plants, as measured per tonne. And what the value is of their by-product (assuming they can find a market for it, given that this obstacle is one they outlined in their SEC filings).
Put some meat behind your ranting, please. Or were you just trying to ruffle feathers?
A little sensitive?
Why hasn't mantra managed to get their super-profitable ERC pilot running yet then? If it's such a no-brainer, why haven't all the funds been ponied-up and why aren't we seeing ERC plants at dozens of locations already?
Mantra's share price is a train-wreck, and implies that shareholders (of which I am no longer) are now doubting that an ERC will ever be built and turn into the cash cow it's so revered (on this board) to be!
Sure, a cement plant emits far higher concentrations of CO2 than the 400ppm found in air, but that doesn't mean it's substantially less costly to absorb it and create a usable product from it. All the Alberta-based company has to do it pump 200x more air through their system than the cement plan billows out, but that's not hard to do with a simple wall of low-cost fans.
This company figures they can capture carbon from air at a cost of $100/ton. The questions are simple: what's Mantra's number, and what's their by-product worth when sold?
Gates has put some money into another Canadian CC tech called "Carbon Engineering", that sucks CO2 out of atmoshperic air.
The demo'd a $9million pilot plant, and are looking to commercialize.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/business/pilot-plant-in-the-works-for-carbon-dioxide-cleansing.html?_r=2&
Possible threat to Mantra's ERC? Or compliment? They don't need to co-located on sites with highly concentrated CO2, like Mantra's does. I would imagine the financials are weaker given the value of carbon in high density at a cement plant (containing betweem 100 and 500x more carbon by volume), but if this thing can be run profitably using solar energy alone, it would be a home run.
There's also mention of the tower producing (!) 90 millions tons of pure water per year. This is not something we've been told about before (although the Manzares prototype tower did show plant growth under the canopy, suggesting the production/collection of lots of moisture in an otherwise arid area).
At New York City prices (to compare), 90bn kg of water (23 billion US gallons) that's almost $100 million _worth_ of water every year.
Incidentally, on Q Analytica's website, they put the capacity of the tower at "300MW", not the 200MW from the original plans. That's a huge increase, and by my estimations would result in a tower generating between $80-$120 million in revenue annually, depending on the terms of the PPA.
Some links on Q Analytica:
Their website page about EVM's tower:
http://qanalytica.com/multi-tech/renewable-energy/sut/
Their facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Q-Analytica-%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%88-%D8%A3%D9%86%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%AA%D9%8A%D9%83%D8%A7-395062480627100/timeline/
A random 2-year old PR about a JV with Total and Qatar Petroleum:
http://www.offshore-mag.com/articles/2013/02/total--qp--q-analytica-join-to-improve-oil-fingerprinting.html
Seems like a legitimate and well-backed company that could add a lot of momentum to Enviromission's commercialization plans!
News out -- a new HOA for Middle East & North Africa!
Enviromission (the company, not yet the share price) is on a tear lately. Not only do they have a HOA in place for Texas and Arizona (including having collected milestone fees in the millions of $), AND the recently announced $100 million investment and HOA for India, but today there is another agreement in place covering the Middle East and North Africa with a Doha-based entity!
http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/company.do#!/EVM
In today's PR, they give the following details about the upside to EVM:
* partner to invest $1.5 million in EVM shares at A$0.20 (or market price if it's higher), which gives the partner the right to 10 million options at A$0.3 (expiring in one year)
* $3 million development rights fee due by Dec 15, 2015
* annual royalty fee of 1% of all project CapEx
* 10% of gross revenue once operational
* 21% equity stake in each tower (not dilutable below 15%)
This is all fantastic news. But they still have yet to break ground at any of the proposed sites, so it's not in the bag just yet...
Thanks for that.
The good news about the share price languishing (my words) at this level, is that when it finally does get legs (assuming there is a decent increase in revenue along with profitability on the horizon), it should be exciting.
The feeling of lots of DD and years of patience being rewarded, is very gratifying. I still think we might see all-time highs before the end of the year.
http://www.enerdel.com/mobile-hybrid-power-system-mhps/
for applications including "remote tactical"
oh, and from Ideal's own PR last year about their partnership with EnerDel, there was this:
The DoD reference was puzzling to me too, so I dug a little. Enerdel did have dealings with the DoD for their battery storage initiatives, which must have shifted into full-blown microgrid initiatives by now. So this order clearly must be related to that (or else it's patently misleading).
https://gigaom.com/2009/03/13/ener1-outlines-lithium-ion-battery-plan-eyes-defense-contracts/