[Logan]

I request everyone not to post/share details of any meet with the management team or any replies from the company.

When we have this much uncertainty we thought sharing information would make us United but turns out it’s doing the opposite and it’s dividing us.

[Logan]

@nitin_asce, please check my post #10373. In that I’ve shared a link wherein it says that dividends usually will be credited within 30-45 days after the record date. If we take 45days then it should be credited by 4th February but in the annual report it’s mentioned that it will be paid on or before 25th Jan.

Which date should we consider? If it is indeed 45 days then why did the company mention it will be paid on or before 25th Jan?

Which of these days/dates will SEBI consider?

Please share your opinions on this.

[Logan]

I hold stocks of a company that issued dividends, how and when will I get the dividends?

In this article they’ve mention:

“The dividend payment date is generally 30-45 days after the record date.”

The record date was 21st December. If we take 45 days then it should be paid before 4th February.

But in the annual report it is mentioned that the dividends will be paid on or before 25th January.

Really confusing, I didn’t have problems with dividend payment from other companies. Always these type of dramas happen only with BCG. It’s not like they don’t have the money, they paid 5.5crs to Axis in the last 3-6 months.

[Logan]

Thanks @sandyc316 for the reply.

I also called them now and they are saying that they haven’t received any communication from the company. The person who I spoke to told me it’s the company’s responsibility and Aarthi Consultants can’t do anything about it.

[Logan]

@sandyc316, when you called Aarthi Consultants, did they just say 1 or 2 days or did they give any specific date/day by which the dividend will be credited?

[Logan]

@jbedi, why would you assume that?

I didn’t get personal or hyper (I don’t understand what hyper means here in this context)

It’s very simple, you asked a query and I answered it.

1) The first part of your first question can only be answered by the CEO.

For the second part, I don’t think he’s ready to meet only those investors. As I’ve told you in the previous post, any investor can visit the company but they have to check in advance whether the CEO is available or not.

2) I don’t know about that. It all depends on shareholders rights. You can check with investors relations or any shareholder rights group who will have better knowledge on that.

3) Almost all the shareholders will meet the CEO to get clarity and we can’t depend on those meets to get any materialistic outcomes. The CEO won’t share any sensitive information about the company with shareholders.

Not just the Hyderabad members but many other shareholders have met the CEO in past. The forum members share the details in this forum but others won’t.

[Logan]

@jbedi, the CEO is not meeting Hyderabad based investors on any preferential basis. The investors themselves are going to meet him and the CEO can’t say no to that. Any investor can visit the company but we have to check in advance whether the CEO and/or the management team will be free to meet us. That’s the reason they inform the company in advance.

The company shares press release after every quarterly results. In that they mention business developments that have happened in that quarter.

[Logan]

@drjaysee, Vertoz Advertising also does programmatic advertising so you can add that to your list. BCG, Affle and Vertoz are all in the same industry but their businesses are different so don’t know how direct the comparisons will be.

With comparisons to other internet/digital companies in that list, we can talk about the market perception – like how they are valued, or how the sentiment is but business wise all are very different. Sometimes I mention Tanla and subex when I talk about valuation because both of their stocks were beaten down very badly – similar to BCG.

(You can compare Tanla to Route Mobile)

Regarding buyback, @odysee has written about it perfectly in post #10301. I also don’t think everyone will be ready to sell their shares at 15 or even at 20. The gap between price and value is huge and most of the investors are aware of that. BCG can reduce some free float but I don’t think they’d do even that. In the last conference call, the CEO said that he won’t consider buyback now.

[Logan]

With other companies it is “Expect the Unexpected” but with BCG it’s always “Unexpect the Expected”.

[Logan]

@nitin_asce, I don’t know how it plays out. Every company before acquiring another company will always say it’ll be a game changer but we’ll see the results only after a few quarters. Looking at Affle’s record, I think they will have made a good decision.

Sometimes acquisitions will be great for companies, Tanla bought Karix and that helped the company massively. I think it’s because of Karix that Tanla could grow by that much in the last year.

[Logan]

Companies like BCG go unnoticed because Mutual funds and other investment funds won’t do the same research like how debt investment companies do (especially distressed debt investing funds). When someone sees a company trading below 1PE, they’ll assume that something must be wrong with the company and they don’t dig deeper. Distressed debt funds check everything completely before making any move. They’ll check the complete history of a company – from its founding days to the latest development. Mostly they concentrate on debt so they won’t bother much about shares.

Mutual funds won’t touch distressed companies’ shares and also they won’t give importance to low PE shares. We don’t have hedge funds in India where we can find activist investors who will research companies like BCG. Investing in our country is dominated by mutual funds, PMS funds and apart from that there are only retail investors. Mutual funds and PMS won’t be as aggressive as hedge funds. Having activist investors will be good for shareholders but won’t be that good for the company so most companies will wish activist investors don’t invest in their companies.

Coming to adtech industry, most people will see only Brightcom (or Ybrant) and they won’t be knowing about the parent company. There are many adtech companies and most of them are private so everyone will assume Brightcom as a private company. Had he listed the shares in the US, it would’ve been very different.

Also not many tracked adtech companies for many years and nowadays most are tracking because of TTD’s success in the market. If TTD didn’t perform well then no one would’ve given any importance to other companies. Magnite (back then Rubicon and Telaria) went unnoticed for many years and it’s gaining recognition because of TTD. Similar case with other companies too.

As others have written, with this level of corporate governance, the company wouldn’t have survived in the US. Even though the company has talented people like Jacob Nizri, Brad Cohen and others, these people will have startup mentality and they won’t bother about the stock market. There’s no lack of talent in the company but all that talent is concentrated on improving the business and not on improving the corporate governance.

[Logan]

@odysee, I don’t know anything about that topic. I think @nitin_asce or @vgsatwork will have better ideas on this.

See, all this comes down to corporate governance. As I always write, they have to appoint a board member (or someone as an employee) who can handle things related to the market and shareholders. That person can guide the management properly and he/she will make sure that proper information will be shared with the investors. I don’t think Mr.Acharya has experience in public companies and I think he’s more into marketing and related stuff. Even Mr.Reddy after being a CEO of a public company for more than 8 years still doesn’t know how to communicate with the market and shareholders. He thinks that conducting quarterly conference calls are enough but as we all know its not enough at all.

As Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger say this all comes down to circle of competence. WB says “The important thing is to know what you know and what you don’t know.” This quote perfectly suits Mr.Reddy. There’s no doubt about his business skills – he has built a company from scratch with his hard work and efforts but he doesn’t know how to run a public company.

He’s lucky that there’s no activist investor like Carl Icahn invested in BCG. I don’t like the idea of activist investing and I like relationship to be smooth between the management and the shareholders but sometimes we need activist investors to unlock true value of a business. They’ll be like necessary evil. As retail investors we can’t be activist investors because we’ll not have enough shares. We can get together and form a group and we can become activists but that will take a lot efforts and organization. It’s easy said than done. Not everyone will be in the same wavelength. For example, some investors have bought shares 8 years back and some have bought very recently. Both their approaches will be very different.

They should use some amount in that 260crs to improve corporate governance. I don’t think the IR department knows what’s going on and they are very horrible. I don’t think all the blame should be put on them because they follow the orders from the management. They won’t be knowing what to say to the investors without consulting the CEO. I don’t think we’ll see any improvement in corporate governance till they close off all the pending issues.

[Logan]

See @Diana, I don’t want us to have any conflicts.

You have mentioned that

“Its not about you. It is about the management.”

But you have taken my message as a reference for sharing your opinions which for any person looks like you are targeting me. Like I said in the previous message, if you had not mentioned me or if you had not taken my post as a reference, I wouldn’t have asked you these questions.

Whatever you’ve written, everything is correct and I agree with you.

I have massive respect for you. I have been following you since many years. I tried to read all your posts when you wrote in MMB (unfortuantely most of them were deleted before I could read). When you wrote a post thanking me, I was very delighted.

So if you are ready, we can ignore all these recent posts and we can concentrate on the future. No one will benefit if we have conflicts among ourselves. We may have different views and opinions but our goal is the same and we should focus on achieving that goal.

[Logan]

@Diana, don’t you think it’s funny to say that I’m black mailing? What will I get being sentimental? No one will lose anything if I stop writing.

See you targeted only my post and none of the other so it’s obvious for me to ask that question. If you had written randomly without mentioning me, I wouldn’t have cared. Please tell me why target only my post? There’s a thread on warrants topic too, why didn’t you write there? Why not target other posts? Is this the democracy that you have mentioned? Targeting only one individual because you don’t like what he writes.

I respect every member who writes here and in fact I’ll be the first person to like the posts which other members write. I’m not the only one who shares their knowledge here and every person has the same knowlege about the company that I have.

Everyone contributes greatly here. If not for the Hyderabad members, we wouldn’t have this much clarity. Their contribution is more than mine. I may talk theory but theirs is reality/practical. That is more important.

I’ve had disagreements with many members here but no one targeted me before like you did.

I didn’t understand your statement on bias. Aren’t we all biased here? That’s why we have held the shares for so long right? If everyone is practical then they would’ve sold their shares long back. Anyway please tell me where I was being biased about the warrants issue? If anyone agrees with you then they are not biased but if they disagree then are they biased?

I’ll ask you again, why target only me? Why didn’t you write about this topic before?

[Logan]

I’m not saying you could’ve raised complaint to the management. I’m sure you will have like all of us but my point is why didn’t you write about it here on the day of the AGM or in any days after that?

Reading your posts (yesterday’s) feels like you are targeting me. Even my friends have told me the same so I asked you. Nothing personal here.

[Logan]

@Diana, I understand all these things. But why target me for the actions of the management? You chose to reply only to my post but not to the other posts. Why didn’t you raise the same complaints on the AGM day or the day that the warrants were approved? Why target only me? Aren’t you curious as to what the management will do with that money (which was more than the market cap of the company)?

If you don’t want me writing balanced posts then please tell me, I’ll stop writing. Why should I do hours of research so that everyone gets the “right” information? Yesterday I talked about opportunities lost and gained but you chose to bring up warrants issuance. Nitin asked me my thoughts on AI, and agritech but I went off topic and discussed other things also as I found it interesting.

[Logan]

@PBB, I don’t know about the g gang but Oak exited because their fund was closing down. No matter what, they had to sell all the shares that they held and had to return the money (whatever was left) to the investors.

[Logan]

Since we are discussing the warrants topic, everyone should know the facts.

Out of the 114,740,586 votes polled (public-non institution), only 28,745,069 were against the warrants. That’s only 25% of the votes. That means out of 4 people, 3 have voted in favour of the warrants and only 1 has opposed it.

The train has left the station and there’s not much we can do to stop it. At the next station, the exchanges can stop it but when the votes are in favour of the warrants what will they do?

At this point we can only discuss what the company will do with that money and that’s what me and others were doing. Like everyone here I also hate the warrants but we can’t do anything to stop it now and we couldn’t have stopped it before also. How could we have stopped it when 3 out of 4 have voted for it?

The majority sees it as good for them and that’s why they’ve voted in favour of the warrants. It’s simple as that.

[Logan]

@Diana Horton, I agree with you and we all know that (valuation) is the main thing to look after now with all the issues almost sorted out. See whatever I’ve written, I have taken a balanced view. I have always opposed the issuance of warrants and I am angry at them for not disclosing for what purpose these warrants are allotted. I don’t like the allottees too as I don’t see them as stable investors. I have always asked why warrants at a time when they are certain that they’ll get the LOC.

What can we as retail investors do to stop the issuance of warrants? We can vote No to that and we can complain to SEBI but what more can we do when most of the shareholders (even the retail investors) have voted Yes? Many won’t consider the dilution and all they care about is whether the company is taking any action or not. Some see this issuance of warrants as a positive but I don’t agree with them.

That amount he’s raising, it is more than the market cap of the company when it was announced (share was trading at 5). So just like everyone I’m curious on what he’ll do with that money. I thought of discussing with others as to where it will be used. In September call he said he has big plans for the company and in the AGM he hinted he may go for acquisitions like he did in the past so I assumed he may acquire a company using that PW money. I wanted to know everyone’s opinions on this.

All the time when we send questions to the company to be answered in the conference calls, I will always ask the most important critical questions (you can check those). I don’t think I can do more than that to bring changes in the company. I have invested in other companies too but I haven’t seen this much drama in any of those companies.

[Logan]

See this interesting thing about fate :

1998 : Yahoo refuses to buy Google for $1M (maybe 5crs)
2002 : Yahoo realizes its mistake and tries to buy Google for $3B (20-25k crs). Google wants $5B (30-40k crs). Yahoo says no
2008 : Yahoo refuses to be sold to Microsoft for $40B (3lakh crs)
2016 : Yahoo sold for $4.6B to Verizon
Now Google is valued at $1.28 trillion. That’s 93439232000000 rupees. I don’t even know what term to use for that in rupees. Yahoo could’ve bought it just for 5crs!!!!

Similar thing happened in Lycos. It was very innovative and very early compared to many others but now it’s almost non-existent. I don’t think anyone will recognize Lycos now. Lycos was once valued at $12.5B (maybe 70-80k crores) but later it didn’t innovate like it did in the past and was sold to Daum for just $95M (maybe 500-600crs). Then it was sold to BCG for just $36M.

Some of us want the company to invest heavily in AI and ML and some of us don’t want the company to do that and would want the company to look at fixing the valuation. I seriously don’t know which will be better for the company and the shareholders.

(Sorry for going off topic but I found this very interesting so I wrote a lengthy post about it)

[Author]

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