Heiq (LON: HEIQ) shares are now listed again and they’ve fallen 33% as they are. The reason for this is that old one that bad numbers take longer to add up than good ones. It’s taken this long to get the FY 2022 results out which is an indication of how bad and difficult those numbers were.
The background here is: “Materials science specialist HeiQ has published its delayed full-year results for 2022 alongside results for the half-year. When the delay was announced in April HeiQ’s shares tanked, losing almost a third of their value, and trading in the group’s shares has been suspended since early May. The group has also restated its results for 2021. Revenues and corresponding profits that were originally recognised in H1 2022 and H2 2022 from certain milestone partnership agreements have been deferred following a fresh audit. Sales in 2022 fell by 14.8% to $47.2m (£38.9m), and the business made an operating loss of $29.2m (2021 loss: $1.4m).”
There is, of course, a court case going on over those old numbers and the restatement. Court cases, as ever, can go either way.
Heiq share price from Google Finance
As we can see as these results are being digested the share price is rising again. The issue being that a lot of the likely share price fall came before the suspension back in May.
We might also hope that the half year results, also just announced, might be better: “Revenue reduced by 26% to US$20.5 million (H1 2022 restated*: US$27.6 million) Gross profit margin of 40.9% (H1 2022 restated*: 41.5% in H1 2022) Adjusted EBITDA of US-$3.6 million (H1 2022 restated*: US$0.7 million) Operating loss of US-$6.0 million (H1 2022 restated*: US-$1.6 million) Loss after taxation of US$-6.5 million (H1 2022 restated*: profit of US-$1.9 million) Cash balance as at 30 June 2023 of US$7.3 million” And, well, no, not really, But it doesn’t seem to be getting worse, that we can say.
But, as ever, a share price isn’t about what has happened, it’s about what will. The general opinion seems to be uphill from here. Maybe that will even be true.