My suspicion for the reason of their recent flat results is ASW doesn't do enough marketing of their services.
Now, without knowing anyone inside the company, it's a bit hard to confirm the above guess. But, from what I can gather looking at which registrars new IPO companies chose in the past few years, a lot of them didn't choose ASW. Instead, they went to Computershare, Link, Security Transfers, Boardroom, and Automic Registry.
It seems that their marketing strategy is to sit by the phone and wait for someone to ring. Although this strategy is quite cost efficient, but the result is they don't grow fast enough.
NHC, etc, are companies that are affiliated to Washington Soul Pattinson (SOL). SOL is also a major shareholder of ASW, holding about 10%. Since they purchased their stake in ASW a few years ago, they themselves moved from Computershare to ASW. At that time, I thought that they would move the other companies that they control to ASW too.
Unfortunately, so far, only SOL, BKI, MSV had moved, the others (the big ones) haven't. Maybe, they are not too happy with the services that ASW provides? Just guessing....
ASW Price at posting:
63.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held