Pinned straw:
just caught up on todays meeting!
it is such a positive to have an engaged, intelligent, enthusiastic founder owner operator who can also so diligently simplify and communicate his companies modis operandi and strategy to investors not from within that industry! He is a very impressive chap.
AI media have a good product(s) that work, strong customer base and a large and increasing adressable market! Future seems bright!
happy holder and looking to add- a position held solely thanks to the strawman platform
disc- held in RL (12%)
That was a great interview @Strawman!
You did a great job working with Tony to move beyond surface-level thinking and uncover Ai-Media’s true competitive positioning. To Tony’s credit, he’s not precious about how the company’s technological credibility is perceived, and is able to focus on the underlying truth.
I appreciate how Tony understands that he’s just plumbing big tech companies’ AI services - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, video-to-text, translation, LLMs, lip sync, etc. He even mentioned that the encoding of captions - split the audio, merging the text back to the video - isn’t particularly special. The true value is in the entire system: being deeply integrated into the customer’s workflow, building a rock-solid reputation over decades of handling high-stakes events, and possessing the expertise in captioning workflows, along with the custom-developed software, hardware, and processes to accommodate everything.
It feels like the company is in a sweet spot. With the encoders, it has a distribution platform to sell additional AI products - they’ve sold the razor and now they can sell the cartridge with 4 blades, aloe strip and titanium coating to labour the analogy. The technology team sounds super impressive as they plan to launch Audio Descriptions and Voice Dubbing within the next month. Even though the AI service building blocks are readily available - it’s one thing to see tech demos on Twitter vs products that are good enough for professional use cases.
Even though I feel I know the story quite well, this interview did provide me food for thought. A bit to unpack here.
Great summary @Strawman and an excellent meeting .., as ever often so much more powerful without lot's of slides.
I've been stalking $AIM following posts by @Wini and @mushroompanda ... and was waiting today's session to check my understanding. I wanted to push him with the question, what if some writes an alternative software to do what you do (decoder), which he answered really clearly.
What I liked:
I'll add this nugget from their recent result call:
"Over the last few weeks, we achieved a very significant milestone, which was capturing of the Paris Olympics. We did that in Australia. We did that in the U.S. for NBCU. And we also did it for Telemundo in Spanish. I'm delighted to report that for the very first time, we delivered this with LEXI in Australia and the mix of human services, and it was a full LEXI delivery in North America and in Spanish with Telemundo. The result of that was exceptional. We had 0 complaints recorded for what was the greatest show on Earth. And in fact, that has delivered enormous confidence in us and in our customers that this technology transition will continue to accelerate."
What a great reference case!
I'll leave you all to do your own calculations, but if they can get anywhere near $60m EBITDA by 2029, based on organic growth, and with current CAPEX of $1-2m (with D&A running at $4-5m), and P/E cases in 2029 of 20/30/40, then at today's SP it's a steal. In fact, even if it takes them until 2032 to get there, it's still a steal.
I've taken a small position in RL (1.9%) today, and will consider adding with progress over time.
Disc: Held in RL and SM (order submitted)