PIWORLD Interview with Christopher Mills: Spotting value & doing something about it

[Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to the pi world interview recorded on the 20th of september 2021 and today i'm delighted to be joined by christopher mills ceo at harwood capital home of the north atlantic smaller companies investment trust the oryx international growth fund and involved in the joint venture with the odyssey and investment trusts as well as other investment vehicles christopher thank you so much for joining us can you tell us how thank you can you tell us how you got involved in a career in investing and how hard capital came about well basically when i was at school one of my friends started a thing called the cane society which was a society to understand about economics and as part of that we were all given the opportunity to put a small amount of money into a fund which ideally did went on holiday for christmas and came back and had trouble my money because it had all been invested in australian nickel shares and tasmanics in particular and i thought it's this easy it's something i really need to learn about and was it that easy going on from there well obviously not um harvard capital is a sort of a bit of a history i started my career at sami montague which i well actually joined them in 1971 but i was sent off to a university for four years so i actually joined in 1975 in the investment division then in about 1982 i was going to leave to be a managing director a company called invescorp and to get me to stay they gave me one of their funds which is now north atlantic smaller companies trust which i managed since 1982. then i stayed there for a bit helped business uh spun out some in montague um became mim and then invesco mim and then i found and acquired invesco for them which turned out to be quite a good deal for them and as you know investigator is now one of the largest fund manager companies in the world absolutely and then in 1993 i left and was the founder with jamie hambro of jo hambro capital management and we built that business up from effectively very little to the substantial fund management business very much assisted at the beginning by nicola p's but much of the real growth at the end was done with the support of gavin rochester and in 2011 we sold the unit trust business i bought out all the other shareholders and we've now built hardware capital management to about 2.3 billion today might be down a bit we today given where the markets are and along the way of that we built another business up effectively from scratch called harvard wealth that got floated built that up to about 5 billion and we sold that to carlyle last year for about 100 million pounds in in march amazing track record so when you look to invest in a company what are you looking for and has that changed over time and does it differ across the funds i suppose at the heart of things we are value investors you know but i think we can talk a few companies at some stage you'll see that they all have strong balance sheets we do do some more adventurous investing but that tends to be a much smaller proportion of our funds and beyond that what are you looking for basically if you're a value investor you're looking for companies that you believe are trading at discounts to private market value but the key to it is to make sure you don't walk into value traps and therefore you have to take or we do take a somewhat activist approach where you'll see us sit on the boards or have representative on boards of many of the companies that we invest in so that we believe uh the management is aligned with the shareholders to build shareholder value in some cases we hold the investments of very long periods of time hopefully making sure they don't become lifestyle businesses but it can be hard work getting involved in the companies how do you make sure that your time is used judiciously so it doesn't sort of just use up all your time and you don't derive the value from it well i suppose the key to everything in life is ultimately hopefully choosing a good business and then making sure you have a good management team in place so you know if you have something that's working really well and really easy then frankly it's not a lot of work it's the ones where things start to go wrong or obviously from time to time they'll require more work and effort because they're going to make an acquisition or a disposal or whatever so it's very much i suppose a private equity approach to public company investing but of course we have here a private equity business as well which mercifully has been actually very successful for us over the years and you've got strong exposure to life sciences what is it about life sciences that excites you well i suppose we've been in life sciences for a long period of time we've never really done drug development so we're really into a bit of components but a lot of it is diagnostics or specialist services basically these are fundamentally good businesses for a long period they were in my opinion significantly undervalued and that's beginning to change and you've seen big increases in life science company valuations all over the world but basically you have the opportunity to get into these businesses with good market often these businesses have good market shares and niches i'll give you some examples of some early companies that we did and basically they throw off lots of cash enables you to grow the business and they're fundamentally growing businesses so an easy example for you would be that a long time ago we owned a company called orthoplastics orthoplastics was a duopoly providing very complex plastics hips and knees when we invested in the company nobody really cared i think we paid five or six times to get into it everybody who likes um running marathons on roads as a natural customer because their knees will run out and the hips won't be in good shape either but basically it's a simple play on people getting older with more and more people eating hips and knee surgery so you have a market growing so three percent per annum in real terms we took the opportunity while we owned the business to move just out from making plastics into making components the barriers to entry are prohibitive you you could not get into that business in five years if you wanted to so it had good margins growing business an opportunity to add on to that another business we did a long time ago would have been celsius celsius was a conglomerate we sold bits and pieces off and we focused on the core business which was detecting the rapid detection of pathogens in liquids so that fitted in with just-in-time manufacturing it was when we got involved in the business it was really a european american business by the time we finished it was a global business so there's a whole bunch of stories around that and they've been successful investments for us we we think we know what we're doing and have done very very well in it so of course what we all want to know is what provides the best opportunities in the sector today well the one that we really like and we're still buying at the moment and i just think it's a frankly a no-brainer investment is um for cassia to give you some background the management teams we were involved in the largest shelter in a company called bioquel which we sold to eco labs about three years ago now the management team went in there they cleaned up the business i think they went in the share price of one pound forty and three years later they got us out at nearly six pounds the same team ian johnson was executive chairman of bioquel michael roller was his uh finance director sarcassia and now it's for cassia and cicada has now been cleaned up it was a total mess that came out of the woodford stable but they just came out with results where they announced that they are now ebitda positive and they believe there's significant opportunities from here to put it in context uh the management has a super bonus at 62.4 p share which would value the company in about 250 million and that compares to the current share price of 37p so you know how how real is it that you can get the share price to at least 62 and a half p the only business left in the company is niox which is a point of care test for nitrogen so that asthmatics can determine how much nitrogen they have in their breast which enables them to control which medicine that they use a company has a totally dominant market share and put in its context it's got about 90 percent recurring revenues 75 percent ebitda margins and they have no debt and about 11 12 million of cash at the moment now because the business basically requires people to go into hospitals and or doctors the business was hurt last year but it's now recovering strongly and brokers forecasts of around about 27 million of sales this year with ebitda in the region of 2 million we expect sales to grow to approximately 40 million over the next couple of years as things get back to normal and put that in contact actually sales in 2019 were 35 million so it's not such a big hot to get up to 40 million and when they get there we would be looking at give or take 11 million pounds of ebitda and obviously there's a high probability this company is going to get sold at some stage so the buyer would look at another couple of million of ad back in corporate overhead so you're looking basically at 13 million of ebitda a company with this sort of market share this sort of growth is certainly worth 15 times ebitda which is 195 million we would expect the cash and they've also successfully negotiated a payment for a product so the cash should be up to about 35 million of all goes according to plan and then because of the unfortunate mistakes of the past the company has a 600 million pound tax loss carry forward that would save the buyer probably 150 million in taxes but it would take time to arrive so if you did a present value of that say 20 million pounds you've got your 250 million pounds easy peasy i'm making the assumption that buyer will will have a global distribution network and that would enable them to cut out costs in the sales expense of about 6 million but the buyer would have a much larger global presence although this company is totally dominant in its marketplace it still only has five percent of the world market so the buyer with that sort of opportunity could well start paying aid for the synergies and b for the ultimate market growth not so dissimilar to the price that we got for bikewell that's just the core business the company is also now developing plans to enter the home care market basically move out of hospitals and doctors offices into other healthcare facilities and or homes and should that prove successful that too would have a major impact on the company's business as i said the results came out recently they were maturely higher than market expectations and to give anybody listening to this some comfort all the senior executive directors bought shares around that current market price on thursday tremendous thank you very much indeed um do you want to say anything about source bio that um gave an update today yes i mean the source bioscience has well has i suppose if you look at it three assets first of all it's got a market cap today of 90 minutes so basically it's got about 20 million pounds in cash it's got about circuit 10 million tied up in working capital in covid testing and i'll come back to that in a moment and thirdly it's got its core business um which is a mixture of genomics which grew very rapidly even in 2020 pathology which had a terrible year in 2020 because people weren't doing cancer testing which is tragic because if you don't do the cancer testing things a lot worse when you finally get around to it and then a stability storage business where it's a global leader we've the companies announced that they're already back on track on the pathology business and the pathology business is a naturally good growth of the three because the nhs is increasingly having to outsource pathology because it takes about 10 years to be a fully trained pathologist and something like 25 percent of their pathologists are due to retire in the next seven to ten years also this company specializes in doing very complex testing so to give you some concept of that each test will consume something like five gigabits of data and it then takes very experienced people to read that data because if you get this wrong you you really can kill people obviously you don't but the failure to diagnose the cancer appropriately would have very bad effects for people so that's fundamentally a good business and we think that those three businesses are worth you know 70 million pounds perhaps a week a bit more if they were to be sold to a third party because they're growing collectively at about 15 to 20 percent uh with ebitda in their excluding corporate overhead of in excess of five million pounds so covid testing company is tonight it does about 15 000 covid tests a today and it was hoping to build that up to about 30 000 well 22 000 in its own facilities and another few thousands outside there clearly with the government's announcement today that will stop within the next let's say four or five weeks although covered pcr testing is what we're discussing will continue on because as you go to other countries they still require you to do a pcr test uh when you enter them so it's unquestionably going to slow the other side of it is that there's a number of laboratories out there that don't have full approvals what they've been doing is saying they're going to get approvals they then don't get approvals they close themselves down and start up again the next day and the government is cracking down on that so if kova tesley was to let's say stabilize around about 5 000 tests a day there is also pricing pressure this would still be a nicely profitable cover testing business but certainly not of the order of market forecasts for this company which i think were 30 to 35 million pounds that's that that's the thing of the past so you think the drop in the share price today is understandable i think at the current level the company stacks up on fundamentals because if you just simply say covert testing was to stop tomorrow everyone would pay us we'd work off the bit of inventory we've got it's not big you have a business you know with 30 million of cash and a nice rapidly growing core business thank you and are there any others in the sector that you think we should be looking at i think the days of clinton will be will be numbered elliot's got a big stake in it i think trinidad itself is a bit of a mess to be truthful with you but i'm sure it can be sorted out what do you think should happen there well what i think should happen it's kind of irrelevant because i'm not the one on the board but somebody needs to basically start integrating all those businesses it's never really happened in my opinion the strategy that they've employed in the past of well because we sold a business called quantum pharma which we got involved in we cleaned it up i think we raised the money at 35 p and they paid us 95 p and about 18 months later so we got some insight into how they ran businesses at the time and you know it was from that for an outsider's perspective what they were trying to do was buy earnings using their high multiple now that clearly doesn't that's still not that's not going to be an option anymore but i think there's probably some value in clinton but i think it'll take a bit of time to come out but i don't see elliot going away it's not the reputation thank you and what sectors beyond life sciences do you think provide the most interesting investment opportunities today well we've got a couple of quite large investments here in fund management businesses one of them is polar capital and polar capital for us is a relatively simple story again it's on a p you can recognize like about 12 and a half it's got no debt about 100 million in cash yielding nearly five percent the logic behind polo capital is we're not very good at technology where ps are often infinity and yields are zero so polar provides an ideal solution as fifty percent of their funds attack while the balance of their other assets are growing very fast as the company's chief executive gavin rochester who obviously i worked with joe hambro capital management takes the company into esg and emerging markets so i kind of think for us that's a you know very easy no-brainer because i absolutely believe gavin to build this business very significantly over the next three to five years and you don't worry about increasing compliance costs or increasing demands from fund managers to earn more i think fund manager they have an interesting model where the fund managers actually have their own business that kind of caps it so the terms are set out it's not a wage thing you you own part of your business and then ultimately you can switch that into polar capital shares so it's it's the same model basically as we had at joe hambro capital management so basically it ties the fund manager to the performance to his own performance so it's a bit difficult for him to start arguing for more money compliance costs are there but once you reach a certain size they've become more containable i suppose great but yes it's it's a problem for the whole industry um i mean we are a large shelter in poland i think their second largest institutional shareholder the second one that we have a big stake in is obviously uh asic yes where we are the largest shareholder and we are backing martin gilberts who build aberdeen to create a new fund management business certainly the transactions he's done to date have been in my opinion outstandingly good and we look forward to working with him to build it still further how long has he been there uh since the beginning of the year and what's he done in that time well we've basically done i suppose four transactions one was a small fund management business to basically give us all the regulatory approvals but they have some excellent performance the next is a is a platform business which we bought 30 percent of and that was a platform business that was brought out of aberdeen which in my opinion it was bought at a very favorable price and then we basically have done another platform deal for launching etfs and then finally of course we have a bacon river and mercantile which is announced it's selling off its trust business and i think will be a successful investment for us and certainly it's going well so far so where do you see it going from here let's put it this way i'm on the board i know i can't tell you moving on to what you wanted to move on to and then the third one where again we have a larger shell there's frenkel topping and frenkel topping we believe is that is performed well there's a and it just came out with results today that were very good indeed but we think we're just at the start of the journey at frankel topping frankel topping still only has a market capitalization of about 75 million and basically it's an ifa but this is not the traditional ifa story which we think increasingly doesn't work anymore because what we did in harvard capital was we basically bought ifas uh consolidated them but the key was there was an arbitrage spread between the value of our equity and the price we could buy these businesses at now that is changing the price of businesses is going up so it's getting much more competitive you know obviously we sell to carlyle so they're now in the marketplace looking to buy and there's also a risk that this industry becomes a target for defined benefit miss selling so if we talk about frenkel topping the results that came out today are ebitda went up by about 120 the reason why franklin toppings interesting is that it's one of the few ifas that can actually grow its funds under management organically and the reason for that is that we're in a niche part of the market which is the court settlements business now the court settlements business basically generates about four billion of funds under management a year and those funds that look after people who have been very severely damaged either through clinical negligence or through catastrophic accidents such as falling off the back of a motorcycle and you're going to be a vegetable for most the rest of your life so you have to have a very conservative investment policy and it's therefore specialist business frankl topping has about four percent of that marketplace at the moment which means that we're actually growing the funds under management at about 15 plus percent a year which no ifa even gets close to absolutely and so that is a really nice business we might have to buy some stage a small ifa just to cope with the volume but we're categorically not going to be an ifa consolidator then if you look behind that business there's a two and a half billion service business looking after the people to get help them after their severe injury get them their compensation claims etc and that splits about one and a half billion in legal and a billion in various services and the various services businesses basically relatively small businesses they're not con they're not it's a fragmented industry and frankly topping is the sort of first company or absolutely got first mover advantage in basically consolidating that service industry and these are nice little companies they've been built up by individuals many of which are reaching retirement age but who are prepared to do earn outs and stay for at least two to three years after we acquire the business and consolidated into our group at the moment uh we believe frenkel topping is the largest writer of witness reports so basically when this person's damaged person goes up just towards the end of getting their compensation we need to say to the judge who's going to give the award you know this person if he needs prosthetics will need changes for aesthetics another seven times in his life the the at the cost of prosthetics he will need this um he will likely need the nursing care at some stage in his or her life and on it goes and this isn't ambulance chase thing at all this is basically a professional report that's accepted by both sides this is what this person is going to need and that will be gathered also from other service providers the second thing which we're now the largest in the united kingdom is costing services so what costing services are is all to do with the person has just had his accident let's say he's lost his legs in the accident so it'll take about two to three years to go through the court process so what does it cost to keep this person financially sound etc for the two to three years while it goes through the court process and you know that requires you does he need psychiatric help again in this case prosthetics does he need a new car because he can't touch the pedals of his own car is that staircase too steep in his home so he's going to have to move home and on it goes does he need physiotherapy psychology and basically a costing's company will take that to the court the court will agree what's fair and reasonable to look after him over that two to three year period has nothing to do with his final settlement it's just to keep him going for that period and our last acquisition uh for example we bought the leading company in the united kingdom dealing with cerebral palsy for example and the long-term thinking behind all of this is that as we grow the businesses and as we grow the services that will give us hopefully two competitive advantages one we can go to the lawyers and say we can provide this suite of services for you which makes it easier for them to go to a one-stop shop and we can be more competitive on pricing because we will have the whole suite of services the second aspect is it'll give us more entry points into the client with the long-term objective increasing our funds on management market share and how long have you been involved with it because historically it was the the business model's the same but it was a fairly torrid journey for investors well we became involved in it i would say two years ago but i really went on the board about a year ago now the new strategy was very much a function of something that was dreamt up by richard fraser and i because i obviously had the experience of being involved in building an ifa that previous strategy was to clean it up and sell it to somebody but that didn't work then they were thinking of building an ifa group and i basically said that doesn't make any sense and then richard knows all these other service providers because it's a small industry they're all friends and basically has unrivaled contacts with these companies that's the strategy we agreed to do we raised the money to do it we've still got no debt and about six seven million in cash so we continue on with our acquisition program there'll be some act payments but they aren't very large at the moment so just suppose everything came together at the right time one of the things that we look for and the is you know really sticky money where there isn't fee compression and this fits the bill as good as it gets and moving on you've got a fantastic track record with successes like mj gleason ekf and ogn how do you find the right strategy and the right management and how critical was your role in these turnarounds well obviously i don't do the work [Laughter] so well i don't do much of it anyway so i mean if you just go through gleason i mean when we first got in gleason we we understand it because frankly it was creating a discounted tangible book it's obviously trading that the substantial premiums tangible book strategic lamb is always fundamentally good business but it's cyclical and sadly some of their heads of housing in the past had let's say not been as good as they should have been and they'd overpaid for land and stuff like that so i joined the board and then a man called david floyd introduced me to john harrison and basically the board met john in house and thought he was a really good guy and jollian came in completely transformed the housing business and that's how that one got started ekf was different ekf the board had had a strategy of making acquisitions which led to a strategy of over-promising and undelivering and then they made a catastrophic acquisition called sealer at which point they lost pretty well all credibility in the city and at one stage ekf stood for every known f up and basically um we got involved because we believe the fundamental value of the point of care business was more worth more than the share price there was an aggressive american who was basically trying to stack the management team and we thought the management team were actually very good we wanted to change the strategy so we became the company's largest shareholder the americans threatened to sue the management team so harvard indemnified them from the lawsuit which i think saw things that we can do which other institutions wouldn't do i then went on board as chairman we then adopted a program which they're all grateful doesn't happen anymore every single week we put a list of tasks that had to be done and every single week we examined where we were in those tasks all the board fees got cut to zero gosh interesting way to make our other directors happy but never mind it was appropriate but a third of the workforce was ultimately removed and a number of facilities were closed and we just focused on restoring the business for health which it happened quite some time ago now we basically said we're not going to do any more risky acquisitions which we haven't done so far we're not planning to do them anyway and the real point to the whole story is that a core business that losing money over a three year period with the management team was in place turn that round to making you know 10 plus million a year amazing that enabled to build the balance sheet have lots of cash we started paying dividends and then of course pretty well thanks to julian baines we took one of our technologies and entered into a joint venture with mount sinai which resulted in a whole string of you know new life sciences companies being spun off into the public marketplace which includes trellis health analytics verity for others yes yeah and so the people were already there it's just you know obviously they went along with the acquisition strategy but it just wasn't the right thing for that company at the right time the early acquisitions were fundamentally good but then it you know there's a rush to keep the share price up to make the next one so we took a completely different line when i arrived and that was that we wouldn't do profit warnings unless we really had to and i think it's fair to say we've had at least 16 profit upgrades since i became chairman yeah it's been a phenomenal track record on that one and looking at the recovery place that you take on these these value investments what success rate do you achieve i mean does it go wrong uh well i'll answer about og and then i'll talk about one that has gone wrong it wasn't and it wasn't intended to be a recovery play though um or jun basically had a chief executive who had made a number of mistakes and basically had to go and i would talk to a number of other shelters and disagree that he should and then at the same time a huge claim arrived from the inland revenue which scared a lot of people even in the company said the claim was without merit and that remains our opinion it is without merit um in fact we are now suing the inland revenue because we we paid it we paid it off because it was just easier to pay it uh rather than incur the interest and then i met jim meredith who been chairman had ever seen this bit of a mess and i realized he was the man who could solve all my problems he knew exactly what to do to clean this company up and he's done a stunningly good job mark who's the finance director has also done a stunningly good job but you know from the very beginning jim made it clear that you know we're all going to work together but we're all going to work together to deliver a victory for shareholders we would probably have tried to do that last year but kovit came along and as you know there's two bidders for the company at the moment and the share price is up to sort of 340 well that's the last bid was 340. but no i mean that's very much down to jim and his management team who literally cut the cost base significantly refocused the business on ash where i think we're now the market leader uh in the disposal of hazardous ash and we're going to hopefully give sheldon something to smile about well you have done already yes [Laughter] so uh going back to your success rate how many hits do you get and how many misses percentage-wise i mean there have been mistakes but the big recent mistake was eskim yeah which was the earl stobart i don't actually think honestly the investment decision was a mistake because they came out after the covered thing and told the world that they've been extremely close to selling 25 percent of the airport for 175 million pounds had they done that the private market value would have been twice what we paid obviously as covert arrived the airport effectively closed well it hasn't closed because there is a logistics centre at the airport which is which was actually nicely profitable but it doesn't make the thing profitable then of course housing slowed down which meant the mass waste would slow down so the amount of woods for wood shipping which is our other business slowed down but that's now recovering but it hasn't been a pretty story um another mistake was the girls soccer although that wasn't that expensive where it was just fraud and the question is can we win some of that money back through litigation and not sure i've got wish to do another litigious job i've done too many in my life so those would be examples of a recent mistake we were lucky because it didn't show the eskian era didn't really show in our asset value last year because we had a private equity investment which has been in our books for a long period of time which was in cyber security and we were valuing it as a dollar and a quarter and we earned about 1.4 million shares and we sold 1.2 million an average of about 30 so that covered the error but that was more likely than good judgement and looking at both of them looking back could you have done anything to avoid it i mean with eskin black's one event of kovid yeah there was nothing we could do about that the problem when you have fraud and the chief executive entity financial officer cooperating in it and it was quite a sophisticated fraud because they would create earnings by capitalizing fictitious capital expenditure and the orders pick it up so it looked like we had lots of free cash flow it looks as if we were investing in the business and growing the business but in reality we've the two balance a lot of it resulted in balancing off and then they got innovative with the vat vat payments the company was paying and the inland revenue visited the company more than three times the review of that they didn't pick it up the auditors didn't pick it up and the fact the company had won a fat tribunal case against the revenue led the boards conclude that the management knew what they were doing on that sadly didn't turn out to be the case and do you think you're better now at assessing management and assessing people character which is what it ultimately comes down to oh god well let's go back i would hope so but i've been at this game for 45 years now so if i haven't learned a little bit about bit along the way from that then things really are a bit depressing and why is the discount to nav so high for the north american smaller companies i.t i think it's the well i think part of this i think there's probe two problems a there are big holdings there but they're companies that are not very well known by people and so unless i'm sitting here and let's say telling you the story on frenkel topping which would be a 20 million pound holding you know you could say what on earth that and as you know remember when i first mentioned the name franklin topping you kind of were inferring it was a bit of a dog truthfully if you don't know the stories behind it if you don't do your research you just need to know why we own these companies and how we're going to get in and out of them and what the plans are um secondly uh there's a portfolio of private equity in there which again you know people just say what on earth is that um but you know if i take you for example just give you a few ideas in the latest fund um the cc is that we bought businesses at an average of about 5.5 times it's growing very rapidly it's pet foods hml is property services we bought that at about 6.5 times there's then a specialty packaging business for third largest medical packaging business in the united kingdom that was brought in about just under seven times and by the way we don't put a lot of debt in these deals then there's a data center deal which was bought at eight times we tried to buy another business which was about the same size that it was sold 15.5 times so it's possible we're actually going to sell that business in a year of owning it another one which i'm really excited about it's called 3bl 3bl was bought at six times cash ebitda it's growing at 20 per annum and it's the largest company in the world assisting and it's not big but it just happened to be the largest world assisting very large corporations as to how they communicate their esg strategies to stakeholders so their clients would be walmart a world wildlife fund bloomberg they've literally got 40 percent of the s p as clients and they're now going down into sub five fortune 500 companies very interesting sector so you know if you look at all those companies and say you know the average there was probably seven times you know we would hope when we come to sell these companies and we build them up a bit you know we'll be looking at you know 10 11 times and growing them and a good example would be something we just sold which is a joint venture with lloyd's development capital we built up a very good pest control business we provide products professional press control companies like rent to kill orkin etc we built that up over four or five years we then put it into a vehicle called pulses which was controlled by lloyds and about troubled our money when we did that and then pulses itself performed reasonably well while we were together so that company by the time we came to sell it was making about 30 million euros and got sold for about 10 times a bit more than 10 times ebitda so resulting in another double and that's 20 million pounds is just hitting our balance sheet as we speak but if you don't know what's in there i think that's a problem i think the second problem is a lot of the investors have been with me for a very very long period of time and when i started the fund in 1982 the nav was 32 p and it might not be quite this today because the market's a bit rough but uh last time i checked it was about 64 pounds phenomenal so you know people have made 200 times their money and it's relatively tightly held so we're a big company but it's not it's not that easy to buy 10 000 shirts yeah absolutely so that puts the big institutions off so we have very little institutional ownership the board past and present probably has over 40 percent of the company and you know some people just like the fact that all the board are large shareholders then the chairman in particular i think has got about 15 million pounds in it and by the way we changed the board i mean we've got three directors are all in there for less than four years so that's not the issue chairman has been there for a long time and we have hundreds if not thousands of relatively small investors but as i said it goes back to you know an average volume of 6 000 shares a day yeah well there's no doubt you've had a phenomenally successful career is there anything that you haven't done that you wish you had or anything you still aspire to do gosh um no i don't want to climb everest but you know what i i have a very happy life i actually enjoy my work enormously i'm lucky enough that i don't have to work for a living and i enjoy the challenge of analyzing a new company it's like just learning a new subject all the time you know how the how does the company work what makes it tick where's its cash flows it's just it's just like learning kind of a totally new subject every time so you're creating knowledge and i'm someone who also if you ask me about my hobbies i i probably read 40 books a year you wouldn't want to read many of them but because mainly history but but you know there's a thirst for knowledge and as long as that first exists i love what i do you know i ski i shoot a bit play bridge a bit the lovely family so i'm really happy tremendous thank you very very much indeed can you tell people where they can find out more about you and the funds well one of the easy with things which i've always said to people is you know if you want to there's obviously our annual report but as long as hundreds don't start calling me just give me a call i'll take two things i'm more than happy to talk about it i visit it lots of people uh you know bringing them up to dates more yes we get a few new buyers from time to time but as i said it's hard for the institutions because the institution of who with me have been with me for a very very long period of time occasionally we get a new one but they just can't find stock that's the problem we do buy back stock as well which doesn't possibly help to give you an idea therefore exactly 14 million shares outstanding if we hadn't brought back stock there would be about 27 million shares outstanding thank you so much christopher for a great interview well thank you and to all our listeners please write reviews like and comment on our content on the different platforms it means a lot to us and it helps us get the very best guests like christopher you can also click to subscribe the top right hand side of piworld.co.uk to get a notification of a new video as it's published with no spam many thanks for listening and stay well you

Channel: PIWORLD

Views: 14,253

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 7qYZYMVWDOQ

Length: 47min 3sec (2823 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021