Astron - ATR: A zircon player in Aus and China
If I've got this right, threads started over 2 years ago haven't been carried over to the new forum...?
So I thought I'd start a new thread for Astron since I hold. If the old thread turns up, we'll just ignore this shall we.
So for anyone that hasn't heard of Astron (which is probably most people given the illiquidity of the stock), the are a zircon materials company that operates mostly in China, but is listed in Australia. They import zircon raw materials to their Chinese factories (which are of course low cost by world standards) and do various value adding things (it's complicated) to the zircon flour and sell numerous downstream products.
They have a strong revenue that is roughly equal to their market cap at the moment which has been growing continously for many years. Their NTA are also pretty close to market cap. NPAT was growing strongly but stalled a little over the last year. However, they have quite a large capacity expansion coming online for high value fused zirconia products that is expected to increase revenue and profit in the near future.
They are also developing the Donald Mineral Sands mine in Aus, which, if it gets up and running (i think they're a year or two away from that) will make them a vertically integrated zircon producer/supplier.
They have paid a divident of 10c for the last two years, expect NPAT to be around $20 million, and at the current price of $2.35, that gives them a market cap of $140 mil and P/E of about 7.
Anyway, only wanted to find this thread to point out that there were 270k shares traded today. Now that isn't a lot by any standard, but as I pointed out before, the biggest problem with this company is liquidity (i think the top 20 shareholders own something like 80% of the company), and that's the most shares traded in a day in over 2 years! Also, they've had a couple of dodgy disclosure issues in the past, so though something might be up.
Cheers
Damo
Astron to spend USD 1 Billion
Metal Pages is a well respected internet subscription magazine. On January 31 it carried the following story.
Quote:
Astron to invest in Liaoning for Ti & Zr plant
BEIJING 31-Jan-08. Australian zirconium chemical and rare earth producer Astron will invest $1 billion to build a major plant for titanium and zirconium products in China's Liaoning province.
The plant, which is located in the Coastal Industrial Base of Yingkou, Liaoning province, is designed to produce 400,000 tpy of titanium dioxide, 60,000 tpy of zirconium oxychloride, 10,000 tpy of titanium alloys, and 10,000 tpy of zirconium metal.
The first phase of the project, with $120 million of investment, is expected to come on stream by the end of 2009.
Astron was established in Australia in 1984 and has set up several subsidiaries in China's Liaoning and Shandong province.
Astron has just sold its Zirconium Chemicals business of which zirconium oxychloride is an important part to Imerys for A$ 194 million.
As part of the Imerys deal for the next two years Managing Director Alex Brown is supposed work 50% of his time for Imerys and his wife and Executive Director is supposed to work for Imerys 100% of her time
This leads to the following Questions
1) Are Imerys happy that having bought Brown’s zirconium chemicals business he is setting himself up manufacturing a major zirconium chemical.
2) How can he and his wife develop a major zirconium chemicals facility while at the same time work for what will be a competitor, Imerys on their zirconium chemicals.
3) Investing US 1 billion is extremely price sensitive information but Brown has not announced it to the stock market. He does appear to have announced it to the press though. Will the authorities take action over what appears to be a serious breach of its listing rules.
He did have the perfect opportunity to make the announcement. On the date of the report in Metal Pages he published a "quarterly activities report" classed as "price sensitive" on the stock market. This report made no mention whatever of his proposed investment.
Pijo