One point to keep in mind is that the fall in the share price has been (mostly) on the back of low volume.
I was looking over the historical volume earlier this week, and noticed that the share price first dropped below the 0.40 mark on the 21st of November, with the share price hit a six-month low about a month later, on 20 December, closing at 0.32.
However, in that time frame, there was but a single day in which more than one million shares changed hands: the 26th of November.
So it looks like the collapse in the share price is due to a lack of buyers, which suggests there could be a rapid rebound in the share price if the buyers return.
Of course, the paucity of buyers is surely at least partly down to the paucity of news regarding new contracts over the past 12 months. This might be partly because, as the company has grown larger, the management no longer announce contracts that fall much below the 1 million mark.
However, I am pretty sure that part of the problem this year has been that the focus on China has distracted the management from chasing work in other markets.
I don't doubt there is great potential in China, but China's juggernaut of a bureaucracy resembles a sort of megatherium sloth, whose bursts of occasional lumbering activity interrupt its natural state of extended lethargy.
So with the benefit of hindsight, the lack of news from the China front over the past 12 months probably isn't overly surprising.
On the other hand, the deficit of news from the International business over 2018 has been quite disappointing, and it is understandable that many shareholders are dispirited. I suspect the share price would not have fallen this low if the company had announced an extra ex-China contract or two over the past few months, even if they weren't worth much more than a million dollars.
That said, that was then, and this is now. So the question is, will the next year prove more promising than the last?.
About this time of year I always take part in a stock-picking competition, and so lately I have been putting some thought into which stocks might prove to be the big winners in the new year. (For the record, my pick last year was a shocker, and I really need to be more thorough this time round to win back some dignity).
If you take a step back and try to look at where this company is currently situated from the perspective of an outsider, I think PET could be viewed as a contender for 'stock of the year' in 2019. In part, my reasoning here is simply down to the epic blue-green algae problems we saw in a large number of nations over the warmer months this year.
One topic that Mickem was tracking this year was that situation at Lake Hugh Muntz on the Gold Coast. The blue green-algae issues at the lake were flaring up in the local news in late summer/early autumn this year, and the problems here converted into $$ for this company by December, if the news report recently mentioned here earlier was accurate.
So it took about nine months for the crisis at that lake to convert into a contract, which gives us a bit of a time frame to work with.
While the situation at Lake Hugh Muntz in early 2018 was a mini-crisis, later in the same year in the northern hemisphere, there were major blue-green algae crises in several countries: Canada, Germany, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
If Google trends can be relied on, in all of these countries the blue-green algae problems over the summer were the worst in at least a decade.
This is based on the data on the historical searches for the terms 'blue green algae' or 'blaualgen' (incidentally, I just noticed one more country in which the number of 'blaualgen' Google searches for 2018 were the highest in a decade: the Netherlands. That might explain that article mentioning phoslock from the Netherlands that Mickem mentioned earlier).
We have some concrete numbers on the scale of the problem from one of these aforementioned countries: An organisation called Bund produced a map of Germany showing all the lakes that were closed over the summer in that country as a result of problematic algal blooms. If you count all the red circles shown on that map, there are just over 30.
So, 30 x potential Lake Hugh Muntz equivalents in Germany alone. And you would have to assume that there would have been nearly as many problematic water-bodies in Canada and the United Kingdom.
It took about nine months for the situation at Lake Hugh Muntz to translate into a contract for this company. If we apply the same time frame to the problems in Germany/Canada/United Kingdom etc last summer, that would suggest that we should be hearing about new contracts in these countries in about March or April next year.
So, my feeling is that we could be looking at a string of contracts from Europe and North America in the first half of 2019, thus breaking the long good-news drought.
The recent appointment of the Chinese Directors might also suggest there could be some positive news from China in the near future, but I'm not pinning my hopes on that to any great extent given that the Chinese government seems to work to the beat of its own drum.
Keep in mind that we started the year with the share price just under 0.300. The share price at time of writing, just under 0.35, is less than 20% up from where we began. So most of the hope that had been priced into the stock over the year has now dissipated.
But with blue-green algae problems of plague-proportions across multiple countries this year, the company just needs to convert this 'crisis' into 'cash', a course of action they should have the means to follow through on thanks to the funds received from the options late last year. If they manage to achieve this, the current depressed share price suggests that there is a realistic possibility of significant share price appreciation in the new year.
(20min delay)
