@GazD , nice one.

My first ever Spiffy pop also courtesy of Droneshield

This definitely seems significant: "the most strategically noteworthy agreements since the Company was founded"

Of course, you can thank me for today's jump -- I sold a small amount of Droneshield yesterday (purely because i needed to free up a bit of capital to buy some XRF Scientific).

Typical :)

@Strawman I put in a limit order yesterday (as I prefer to do with my Strawman portfolio because of liquidity and the amount of volatility of some of these stocks) … so there are two of us causing the upwards pressure on share price. Order settled at $1.04 this morning.

Lets see how this agreement compares with the much discussed AVA agreement with Telstra in terms of share price impact and incremental revenue.

Ha, that's a good point @RhinoInvestor -- in a lot of ways the Droneshield announcement is almost as vague as AVA's (and essentially unavoidably so given there are no minimum purchase agreements; it's a 'procurement framework').

And AVA is trading at ~16% less than it was prior too the Telstra announcement. A good deal more than any dilutionary impact from the recent $3m raise.

@GazD and @Rocketrod its just fallen back from Spiffy Pop for me (18c original purchase).

I’ve still got a very small amount of Accenture stock from IPO back in 2001 when I used to work there and that thing now has almost daily Spiffy Pops and Spiffy Drops. Grant price was 14.50 and current share price is around 300 (>18% CAGR for 20 years is a wonderful thing … just a shame I got such a small grant).

My long term ambition is to get a “Spiffy Dividend” (my own term = an annual dividend the same size as my initial investment … to put things into perspective that’s a 20 bagger with a 5% dividend).

You can never rule out a capital raise @Mujo -- but Droneshield has >$55m in cash, no debt, is now profitable and last year did over $7m in free cash flow. They've already ramped up manufacturing (apparently they can already handle $400m in capacity), so no obvious and significant near term CAPEX requirements on that front.

Still, at 10x trailing revenue, or a PE of ~82x, i can imagine there's a temptation. And, honestly, it would make a certain amount of sense -- this is exactly the type of stock that could drop 30% in a short space of time given all the hot money that seems to be chasing it. Why not pass the hat around when the market is super bullish?

.. then again, trailing metrics may be very misleading here. After all, the company saw 3x sales growth last year, and 10x growth in the most recent quarter. It's still sticking to a $300-500m revenue target by 2028. So I don't think it's nearly as expensive as it might at first look.

All of which is to say, who knows!?

Yep no opinion from me, I've never looked at Drone Shield. Just saw the post on linkedin after perusing Strawman and saw it was being discussed.

DroneShield seeks $75 million from investors, hires two brokers

Sarah Thompson, Kanika Sood and Emma Rapaport

Apr 18, 2024 – 7.45am

DroneShield, the company that wows everyone with its tech gear that zaps drones out of the sky, is expected to launch a $75 million equity raising on Thursday.

Shaw and Partners and Bell Potter Securities are overseeing the deal. The transaction is structured as a single tranche placement of $70 million and a share purchase plan of $5 million.

DroneShield boss Oleg Vornik with one of DroneShield’s handheld products. Oscar Colman

The issue price of 80¢ represents a 19 per cent discount to the five-day volume weighted average price of 99¢ and a 28 per cent discount to the last close of $1.12. It is understood the placement was upsized from $50 million following strong investor demand.

Raising proceeds will be used to meet customer demands for accelerated delivery of its counter drone systems, investor sources said.

more to come

Great pumpy announcement yesterday. Well done by management.

#capitalraise

Post-pop, I've now got a pretty solid weighting in Droneshield....but will have to give participating in this raise a bit more thought... ...usually not a fan of going in for seconds on a hype-share.

But on the upside, at least it's not a pre-sales dodgy biotech.

This company has real-world sales.

Ha, there you go!

As I said yesterday, I can see the sense in being opportunistic. I just hope they have the potential to put this to good ROI uses, and soon. There's something dangerous with a company that is flush with cash and is keen on justifying the market's hopes for growth.

I would have called you insane if you had suggested a raise yesterday (I was wrong) but I think this is well played by management. We as investors don't give enough credit to management teams that strengthen the balance sheet when the going is good, but we are quick to be critical to those that dilute when the share price has been battered and things don't look so rosey.

The discount is very steep (28% discount) but their balance sheet is now an absolute fortress -- more than 130m with no debt -- and the dilution is manageable (under 5% - 88m new shares added).This might be the final capital raising this business has to make.

In perhaps fortunate circumstances, I sold down my entire holding yesterday at $1.05 but only to fill short-term cash requirements (outside of investing). When I have cash available, I will be looking to get back in provided the valuation makes sense. I remain a bull and I am not too interested in the noise at the moment. Zoom out, look at the environment this business is operating and look at where they are in their trajectory -- it takes years to establish yourself as a supplier with trusted allied partners and that is exactly where they find themselves.

I actually think this raise could be a signal that they need significant cash injection to finance additional inventory build up in preparation for expected large orders.

And for the comparison's with Ava, this announcement - albeit a little vague - was delivered much clearer without follow up questions required. The fact that the business that is operating in a classified environment, relating to national security, can still manage to spit out an announcement that makes more sense than the Ava one probably answers the questions you need to know. As for a business comparison, I think that answer is an obvious one.