The Business Phone Limited - the long game?

bowlhead99

Scambreaker wrote: »

In any event, it would appear from the responses thus far that people do share my scepticism about this company. No one thus far has said anything good about the state of their accounts.

That is because you can't infer anything good about a set of abbreviated accounts with a director's report which has not been written as a marketing document because it isn't a listed company, a P&L account which is not supplied because it doesn't legally need to be, and an auditor's report which has to make an emphasis of matter that the accounts are presented on a going concern basis while the company has negative net assets.

And anyone here who is asked is going to say holding shares as a minority shareholder in a private company is extremely risky compared to other forms of investment, which you noted that you and your relative were already aware of, and the investment was only seen as a gamble anyway.

None of that means that the company is going bust tomorrow or that it doesn't have a product in development or that it won't be able to raise more finance. The financial position in early 2015 doesn't seem materially worse than in early 2014 - it's not like they've just blown £12m in a year - and the position as of now in early 2016 won't be reported for quite some time so is not transparent; but then it isn't expected to be. It's a private company and to give away more information will potentially damage whatever competitive position it hopes to gain.

You say you had hoped to uncover some accounting irregularity against common practice. However, you can see that a firm of auditors with access to the actual financial records (rather than e simple abbreviated balance sheet that we get) have signed an opinion that the accounts are true and fair - they have not qualified their opinion. So, that's a dead end.

You also say you suspect the money raised from investors was all spent on company's director fees over the years - but clearly this is not the case because there isn't a P&L reserve of negative £12m. We can see some of the money was spent on, for example, investments in subsidiaries and later written off. To find out how those subsidiaries deployed the cash, go and get their respective accounts for the last x years.

I can't be bothered looking at the accounts in more detail as there is not much to see, and I don't know you from Adam. But I must say, I was happy to see your last post. Because for a change it didn't mention M-Pesa, unlike your first three.

When I showed my relative the M-Pesa system, the local existing competition in their target market, he could see that The Business Phone was up against a system that was already heavily embedded in several African countries

If you go to Kenya, one of The Business Phone's target markets, M-Pesa signs over retail outlets are almost as ubiquitous as Coca Cola signs.

phone based micro transaction payment system, requires a large investment in back end hardware, mobile phone software or apps, and technology partners to facilitate all this. A network rather like this has already been implemented in the same African target markets by M-Pesa...

Some would just say this random new user seems to have just joined the forum ostensibly to talk about some unnamed relative's unspecified investment in an obscure private company with minimal assets but really to spam his favourite company M-Pesa.

Cheers, hth.