11/14/09

ECU silver (ECU.to) third quarter results

Yes indeedy that fun time has come around again, as ECU Silver (ECU.to) quietly publishes its 3q09 results. Once you look at them you understand why management never announces it has published results like any normal, respectful entity; it doesn't want to attract attention to this ongoing trainwreck of a financial situation. But never fear, IKN is here! Here are the charts that tell the story.

Let's start with the fact that, despite all the fanfare about higher production and doré bars and grades and stuff, it still managed to make a loss in the quarter

Assets are still held up by its ridiculously inflated fixed asset position that cannot be justified by any normal sentinent being. The company has little in the way of current assets.

In the quarter, ECU.to decided to sweep its debt problems under the carpet by booting a large portion of what it owes into the deeper future. The debt is still there folks, the only difference now is that it will be paying more interest on what it owes for a longer period of time.

But the funny thing is, even though silver shot up in price and even though ECU.to booted a large chunk of its debt load into the longer term future, the company is still running a negative working cap!

Meanwhile, its self-entitled management team decided that they were still worthy of stock options. That's now over $6m in stock based compensation in the space of two years.

And of course, who pays for all this incompetence? Yeah you guessed it.....more share dilution registered in the quarter.
ECU.to now has a deficit of over $100m. Assets-debt = $56m, it can't make a quarterly profit to save its life, it's heavy in debt, has negative working cap but somehow it has inflated itself to a current market cap of $254m.

Disclosure: now you know why I'm short ECU.to as of this week. DYODD.

2 comments:

MontyHigh said...

Your analysis is based on the idea that they are a producer when I thought the whole idea about ECU was that it was an explorer (with gobs of silver resources) and, as such, constitutes an undated option on the price of silver.

How about throwing a price to oz of silver in the ground number in the analysis?

I don't know what that number is, but it might make the company look more respectable.

MontyHigh

Otto Rock said...

when we know how many of those mythical 300m+ ounces of silver (which is mostly base metals equivalent, by the way) are recoverable, then a decent stab at that calc can be made...until then it's pie in the sky.