Annual Report[/B][/SIZE]We lodged our Annual Report with the ASX on Friday night and this was released to the market on Monday morning at market pre-open. The only major change to the Annual Report from the Preliminary Report released a month earlier was the booking of the deferred tax asset. For those that may recall, when we performed the reverse takeover of iCash Payment Systems Limited in August 2015, the entity had significant income tax losses and these had been removed from the balance sheet of iCash many years prior, due to going concern disclosures by the auditors at its time and whilst the Directors were of the opinion that the tax deferred assets (which amount to greater than $6million in assets) could now be booked given the recent acquisition of the Indue ATM Businesses and also the Fast Cash ATM Network, the auditors preferred to and recommended to the Directors that this actually get booked in our upcoming half year accounts and this recommendation was considered and agreed to by the Board of Directors. The ASX and ASIC are paying particular attention to companies recognising these assets and it was recommended that given the anticipated revenues and EBITDA projected for the FY18 year, that the FY18 year would be a better time to recognise this asset and the associated revenue adjustments.
PAC Tech Conference Presentation[/B][/SIZE]I attended and presented at the PAC Tech Conference in Melbourne last Wednesday and the obvious main talking point and questions at that time were largely to do with the recent announcements by the banks and the likely impact on our business. There was a great mix of investors, high net worth individuals and family office representatives at that meeting, including some institutional investors. The presentation was well received and I was extremely popular in question time and fielded numerous questions about my thoughts about the industry and the recent media about the ATM fees in Australia. We also openly discussed our plans for FY18 and our other products to be released and whilst there was clearly some panic selling earlier in the week from the CBA and other major bank announcements and press, we are sure once that investors realise that it has little impact on our business that they will return to bidding for our stock as we continue to produce the improved results on a regular basis and deliver on our previous FY18 estimates.
Media Alerts There has been significant interest in the ATM market in the last few weeks as a result of the recent announcement made initially by Commonwealth Bank on Sunday 24th September and then by all of the other banks a little time after that on the same date regarding their abolishing of ATM fees at their machines for any customers of the major banks. I have been contacted by many journalists for comments on the proposed change and its impact on Stargroup and re-iterated that in my opinion that it would have little to no impact on our transactions and projected revenues given that we operate in an entirely different market, namely the convenience market, where our ATMs have never been close to bank ATMs and in fact one of the first questions in our sales vetting checklist is in fact where the nearest ATM is and what ATM is it? Whilst it is very early on post these announcements the effect on our transactions in the past month on a week by week basis was as follows:
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Further the cash withdrawn on a week to week basis over the last month was as follows:
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As you can see in the week immediately after the announcement our transactions were actually up 2.2% and cash withdrawn was up 2.4%. So my “gut feel” that this would have little to no impact has been proven but we will continue to monitor our Star Payment Systems transactions and the transactions of our ATM Deployers via StarLink (“Big Data”) closely.There were a number of media articles and some of those where Stargroup was directly mentioned were as follows:
