This is some next level fun going on in the Board.
There were 15 directors (max limit until amended through S.R. as per Companies Act) to start with for this micro cap company.
After 2 independent directors resigned, as per my knowledge, board meeting couldn’t happen Unless they restore the balance i.e. to appoint new Independent Director (time consuming considering result in this month) or non-Independent directors to resign.
So they decided that 5 Directors should resign.
Now the Board is of 8 members.
Moving forward, I guess they would try to restore it before AGM. This resignation is a non-event because these guys are the department heads and they will continue working. But no where apart from Holmarc you will see 5 directors resigning until the company is collapsing.
I was thinking that the sky had fallen on the company as I did not check how many directors they had to start with .I thought the entire board had resigned and was searching for company laws . Thanks for your post !
However, seriously , what made them have so many anyway ! Communism or what !
Sales didn,t pick up as expected, the inventory position has swelled up too since the comapny started manufacturing expensive equipments. Is there any hope of fast growth coming for it.
One of the positives mentioned above about the company is that all procurement was mandated through GeM.
According to a recent govt order, that is gone now :
We also have the increase in the limits of purchase amounts of instruments.
The above notification is expected to reduce delay in procurement.
Now coming to impact on Holmarc, I think it should be overall positive. Although competition might increase, but ease of ordering will mean if Holmarc is a trusted company, it will have faster closures of orders and reduction in inventory.
Let us see how it pans out.
Disc. : I have a small position. May build upon it depending upon how the next two quarters go.
Noticed one more large tender win of around 46 lakhs for Electrochemical Workstation with in-situ Raman Spectrometer to the Department of Nanoscience and Technology, University of Calicut under PM-USHA Scheme. The R&D spends are trickling through to institutions. The actual spend 3 years back was ~360 Cr (when it was called RUSA scheme) but this year budget is 1,815 Cr.
This year they have been bidding more aggressively in terms of overall bid pipeline, going by whats in public portals. However, I think they are underselling themselves as they are the only technically qualified bidder in few or their L1 is much lower than L2 in some bids.
If someone is planning to attend the AGM, it would be nice to know the following details
Current order book and execution timeline
Bid pipeline and if they are bidding more than last year
Is the MSE/MII preference still there in bidding? Are there any other policy changes that affect the business positively/negatively?
How is private business scaling up and if there’s any marketing efforts being done - what % is now pvt business and how much was it last year?
How is productivity improvement with all the new hires done in the last 12 months?
ISRO also started in Trivandrum. Today ISRO has 2 R&D centers in Trivandrum. One is VSSC the first ISRO centre and the other one is LPSC. VSSC is the brain of ISRO. LPSC develops liquid propulsion engines for ISRO. Now kochi is considered the economic capital of Kerala. If ISRO can have main centers in Trivandrum why this company can’t do good things from Kerala.
Were you able to attend this year’s AGM? And while visiting last year’s AGM, could you also visit their manufacturing set-up? If so, it will be interesting to know your thoughts on that.. How much Co. manufactures in-house, while how much is bought out components? What are the bought out components, etc.?
They have different capabilities in manufacturing starting from machining tools to advanced optics equipment for making high precision products. Percentage of components could be 20-30% roughly as per my guess. And mostly it could be domestically sourced as some of the university quotations will have such criteria’s. Other than these i have limited knowledge about break up of outsourced components.
Half yearly results that came out have been extremely poor. They are not able to grow their sales despite hiring more people and that has clearly pulled down their OPM%.
