huge debts carried by Singapore-listed offshore firms, page-37

I wouldn't call their timing perfect. But I haven't look into the market condition then to see if it was a bad idea or not at the time. Hindsight... sure, it looks incompetent. But an alternative view on the timing of the purchase could be that nobody saw the oil collapse coming.

That and it would take at least a year for any company to get the acquisition ball rolling. With massive LNG investment in Australia and around the world, and with some $1Trillion of proposed projects that has since been delayed... when it weren't delayed, it might have been a very reasonable thing to do.

Also help that management did not load up to much debt that it would break the company in a downturn. So that's something. I mean, you don't want a lazy balance sheet, and with debt still at only some 52% after some $270m writedown and asset sale, management weren't reckless.

But what I really like about MRM's management is that nowhere in their reports and presentation are they trying to bs the shareholder. I don't see any fluff and unwarranted optimism. In fact, it's depressing as heck reading their forecast. I like that in management. No bs, no trying to puff up or talk up the share price. Just simple facts about its NTA backing, safety and services they're offering.

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From memory, NTA is around $600m. That's after the $270m non-cash writedown over the past two years.

Current price put MRM at some $100m. If the market were to recovery because oil fields do run dry and new fields better be online... that $270m would have some of the losses brought back (or not, but as a going concern, the boats become more valuable)... So say the NTA becomes $800m. That's 1/8 we're buying the company for. Worst case, 1 to 4.

So that's valuation on the bookvalue perspective.

What about earnings?

We can't take the worst earnings in history as representative of the future.

Once normalised, how much would MRM be netting? Around its current net operating cash? $120m? At least.


It's one of those back of the envelope calculation where we either think MRM is going to go broke, or it won't. If it won't go broke, how much would it be worth. Not the current $100m.