The following stocks are the leading risers and fallers among London Main Market small-caps on Thursday.
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SMALL-CAP - WINNERS
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EnQuest PLC, up 2.4% at 11.69 pence, 12-month range 10.34p-17.02p. The oil and gas company, with operations in the UK and Malaysia, has repurchased 132,067 shares at an average price of 11.47 pence each for £15,148 in total. It bought back 107,547 of these on the London Stock Exchange and the rest on Chi-X, BATS and Turquoise. Says that since April 29 - when EnQuest started the up to $15 million buyback announced with its full-year results in late March - it has repurchased 46.5 million shares at a total cost of almost £6.0 million.
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SMALL-CAP - LOSERS
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Palace Capital PLC, down 2.1% at 214p, 12-month range 200p-248p. The London-based property investor has announced first-half results, and its pretax loss has widened to £945,000 from £189,000 the prior year. Revenue has fallen 33% to £8.1 million from £12.1 million, and net property income totals £2.8 million, down 49% from £5.6 million. Palace has also declared a 7.5p per share dividend for the second quarter, unchanged from last year. Adjusted pretax profit came to £2.1 million, down on-year from £2.3 million, which ‘reflects the reduction in income following disposals offset by the significant reduction in finance costs and recurring administrative costs’. Looking ahead, Palace Capital ‘has both flexibility and optionality over the timing of its disposal programme and its further returns of cash to shareholders’ thanks to its ‘strong cash position’. However the markets ‘remain challenging, particularly following the changes announced in last month’s Budget’.
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HydrogenOne Capital Growth PLC, down 0.2% at 26.85p, 12-month range 26.6p-62.5p. The clean hydrogen investment fund says the Berlin-Charlottenburg court has approved applications from HH2E AG and HH2E Werk Lubmin GmbH for self-administration proceedings. HH2E is a German green hydrogen project developer. Company has invested £7 million for an 11% shareholding in HH2E, valued at £11 million or 8% of its net asset value at September 30. The rest of the shareholding is held by Foresight Group funds plus HH2E’s founders and employees. Foresight surprised HydrogenOne earlier this month by not approving an investment proposal to procure further funding for HH2E. It does not expect any recovery of its investment through the insolvency process. However it ‘expects to have sufficient funding to meet its investment commitments and current working capital requirements for at least 12 months’. Notes that the UK government, in its recent Budget, committed over £6 billion to fund hydrogen and related projects. Meanwhile Germany’s Federal Network Agency recently approved and plans to invest €19 billion in a new 9,040 kilometre hydrogen pipeline system, which HydrogenOne says is expected to become Europe’s largest.
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