Realistically, Spectur is too small and illiquid -- even for us! But I do keep tabs on it.

26% revenue growth -- 18% organic

$5.3m in ARR as of the last quarter (60% of total revenue tends to be recurring)

Still loss making and only $1.5m of cash left. Still, they were only $6k in the red on an operating cash flow basis in the final quarter.

Big investments made in FY23 that are hoped to start bearing real fruit in FY24.

I reckon if Spectur was positioned as a start-up, and Gerard had more of a hipster look and ran the company out of a WeWork office in Sydney, they'd be raising capital at a $30m valuation.

On the ASX it trades for less than a Coogee townhouse.

Looks like a solid quarter for Spectur, with a record revenue result of $1.957m -- 37% higher than the previous 2nd quarter and 18% higher than the preceding 1st quarter.

A positive operating cash result helped nudge the cash balance $61k higher, although this was helped by a government grant.

Also good to see the weighted sales pipeline continue to climb.

You can read all the detail here, but all in all it seems the business is pretty much performing to expectations. (Not that you'd guess that based on the share price performance).

Shares are trading on a pro-rata Price to sales of about 0.76.

Disc. I own a small position.

Spectur provided an update today, revealing YTD revenue growth of 27%.

Seems to be executing pretty much in line with what Gerard was hoping for when we last spoke to him.

Pity the liquidity is so awful, but happy to hold a small parcel at current levels.

Spectur has delivered it's strongest 1st quarter to date, with revenue up 15% to $1.66m

The market didn't seem to care much for the results -- although I'm not sure how much you can read into a 6% drop when it's predicated on 10 trades totalling less than $10k. Welcome to the wild and wacky world of nanocaps!

That being said, we did see the unweighted sales pipeline drop from $10.27m on Sep13 to $10.1m on October 3, while the weighted sales pipeline dropped to $4.1m from $4.4m. Of course, that's up a lot from a year ago, and part of the decline would simply be the conversion of sales opportunities to actual sales.

It also wasn't a great quarter in terms of the cash outflow, although Spectur explains a good chunk of that as one-off in nature:

The company now as $2.8m in cash reserves and expects "far lower" cash consumption in the current quarter.

It's really way too small and illiquid to put too much emphasis on; it'll never be something any of us could easily take a meaningful position in.

It's just interesting that this business -- which has a market cap of $5.7m (excluding out of the money options), essentially the price of 4 bedroom house in Coogee! -- is on an annual revenue run rate of almost $7m, and has a recurring revenue run rate of $3.73m pa, with a fairly decent market opportunity and clear sales momentum. One that expects to be EBITDA positive in the medium term and has some favourable interim funding from EGP Capital.

Anyway, you can read the full update here.

disc. I have a 3% weighting here on SM and a less than 1% position in real life.

Spectur had a solid quarter -- a record result for the three months to March 31, and the second highest quarterly revenue on record.

The business did $1.54m in revenue for the period, which takes year-to-date revenue to $4.4m, a 28% lift on the same period last year.

The quarter ended strongly too, with a record $663k in March, the second highest monthly result on record and 25% above last March.

Recurring revenues, which now represent 56% of the total, was a record $863k, giving a yearly run rate of $3.45m. This revenue has the best gross margins; 71%.

The business is still cash flow negative, but fast approaching breakeven. Operating CF were -$255k, a big improvement from the negative $1.9m in the previous quarter. Still, there's only $676k in cash in the bank, although they have an additional $1.1m available. I dare say another cap raise will be needed before too long. Especially with some added staff costs.

The business has a decent sales pipeline and shares current trade at around 1x annualised sales.

It's tiny, of course, and quite illiquid. But certainly moving in the right direction.

Spectur has reported its most successful second quarter on record with $1.42m in revenue -- a 45% gain from a year ago.

The quarter ended especially strongly, with a record $564k in revenue for December, nearly double what it achieved in Dec 2020.

For the calendar year, the business did $6.1m in revenue, a 44% lift on CY20, half of which was recurring in nature.

The business remains CF negative, although the latest quarter was one of the better periods on record with an operating outflow of $263k

The sales pipeline looks healthy, with a weighted value of over $2m, which bodes well for the current quarter.

You can find more detail here

Spectur has reported its strongest first quarter to date, with $1.44m in revenue booked for the three months to September 30.

That's a 37% increase from the previous corresponding quarter and the third highest on record. It's a decent result in light of the fact that two of its most important markets -- NSW and VIC -- were in lockdown for much of the quarter.

With over 40% of this booked in the final month, and a 36% increase in the sales pipeline since June (unweighted), the company seems hopeful of a strong second quarter.

Spectur said it had a record 343 units deployed at the end of the quarter -- up about 40% from a year ago (but largely flat since they last reported this number in late August).

The company was cash flow negative for the quarter -- with operating cashflow at -$680k. There are some timing effects at play (eg payroll, insurance premiums and listing fees are paid annually), and the company did lift inventory levels in anticipation of future sales, but even normalising for this the business is not profitable on a cash basis.

It has $900k in cash and an undrawn debt facility of $1.5m -- so i wouldn't be surprised to see a capital raise at some stage.

Also worth noting the issue of performance shares and options -- if fully exercised/vested it'll increase the share count by around 4%. The options exercise price is only 10c, which doesnt seem like too much of a stretch given the current price.

At the current price, and on a pro-rata basis, shares are on about 1.8x sales.

I have a very small position on Strawman and none IRL -- i'd like to see sustained cash-flow breakeven before taking any meaningful stake, but if the sales momentum continues they are certainly on the right track.

Had a quick glance at Spectur, a tiny little company (~$8m market cap) that develops remote sensing systems. They're pretty impressive, largely self sufficient units that can have high definition and thermal vision, and connected to smart cloud based software, storage and control. They're mainly used by utilities, and for Government and Construction sites. 

At the latest half, the company reported revenue of just over $2m and a loss of $1m.

Roughly half of revenue comes from renting out a fleet of units to customers, and the other half from associated SaaS products. In total they get a roughly 60% gross margin.

On a run-rate basis from January levels, which picked up from a covid induced slump, Spectur is looking at $3m in annual revenues. That'd bring it much closer to breakeven, assuming they can do it.

It seems that the key thing to watch is the growth in the rental fleet, as that feeds the SaaS business. Spectur now has 350 units in the field, having grown from 0 in 2017. But numbers here have been flat over all for the past year or so, supposedly due to covid. Really good to see a strong start to the second half, but i'm mindful that sales tend to be especially lumpy for small businesses. Too early to tell if there's genuine traction.

I also have no insights into the competitive nature of the industry. As an outsider, Spectur's tech looks pretty cool, but I have no idea what else is out there, and how it compares. I might be wrong, but it's hard to see what competitive advantage you could have in this space; i dont think any of the (hardware) tech is proprietary.

I also dont know what the SaaS offering is like, but there'd be a lot of intense competition here in terms of image processing applications. That being said, the system is open to 3rd party integrations, and demand for things like AI, analytics, face recognition etc could be a good driver of unit sales.

The company has around $2m in net cash, which isnt a huge amount of wiggle room. They may need to raise again.

Shares are very thinly traded too, so will be very hard to build any reasonable position, and it'll be very volatile.

Anyway, it's something I might keep on a watch list.