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

Where do you get NPAT of $20 Mill from?

The latest guidance (released in November) was for $18mill.

Was writing from memory TLA87. I stand corrected :)

Sweet :-)

They haven't announced a change to that guidance, so here's hoping they hit it. Looking very cheap if they do.

Yup, definately hope so. I put the money I made from selling half my shares in ADY into Astron, making it my single biggest holding right now.

Wonder what happened concerning that possible 'transaction' (takeover?) mentioned a few months back?

Whoah! See this morning's announcement?

Surprised the bid is still only $2.50...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stephen

Whoah! See this morning's announcement?

Surprised the bid is still only $2.50...

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Why would you post that before open?

Retard.

Well sellers are currently cleaned out.
Look to me that the shares are worth something north of $4.50.

After the sale they will have $3.85 a share in cash backing.

I would say it is worth anywhere between $3.60 and $4.50 depending on the value the market gives to the Donald project and the earnout component of the purchase price (could be worth another $50mill cash), less the capital costs of establishing the mining operations and the titanium processing plant.

Amazing stuff.

Well done to the patient shareholders who held on!