Yahoo Finance Flotek Industries (NYSE:FTK) Is In A Good Position To Deliver On Growth Plans
Just because a business does not make any money, does not mean that the stock will go down. For example, although Amazon.com made losses for many years after listing, if you had bought and held the shares since 1999, you would have made a fortune. Having said that, unprofitable companies are risky because they could potentially burn through all their cash and become distressed.
So should Flotek Industries (NYSE:FTK) shareholders be worried about its cash burn? In this report, we will consider the company's annual negative free cash flow, henceforth referring to it as the 'cash burn'. The first step is to compare its cash burn with its cash reserves, to give us its 'cash runway'.
View our latest analysis for Flotek Industries
How Long Is Flotek Industries's Cash Runway?
You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. As at June 2019, Flotek Industries had cash of US$98m and no debt. In the last year, its cash burn was US$29m. Therefore, from June 2019 it had 3.4 years of cash runway. There's no doubt that this is a reassuringly long runway. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.
Is Flotek Industries's Revenue Growing?
Given that Flotek Industries actually had positive free cash flow last year, before burning cash this year, we'll focus on its operating revenue to get a measure of the business trajectory. While it's not that amazing, we still think that the 10% increase in revenue from operations was a positive. In reality, this article only makes a short study of the company's growth data. This graph of historic earnings and revenue shows how Flotek Industries is building its business over time.
How Easily Can Flotek Industries Raise Cash?
Notwithstanding Flotek Industries's revenue growth, it is still important to consider how it could raise more money, if it needs to. Companies can raise capital through either debt or equity. Commonly, a business will sell new shares in itself to raise cash to drive growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.
Flotek Industries has a market capitalisation of US$112m and burnt through US$29m last year, which is 26% of the company's market value. That's fairly notable cash burn, so if the company had to sell shares to cover the cost of another year's operations, shareholders would suffer some costly dilution.
So, Should We Worry About Flotek Industries's Cash Burn?
As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about Flotek Industries's cash burn. For example, we think its cash runway suggests that the company is on a good path. While its cash burn relative to its market cap wasn't great, the other factors mentioned in this article more than make up for weakness on that measure. Based on the factors mentioned in this article, we think its cash burn situation warrants some attention from shareholders, but we don't think they should be worried. While we always like to monitor cash burn for early stage companies, qualitative factors such as the CEO pay can also shed light on the situation. Click here to see free what the Flotek Industries CEO is paid..
Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies, and this list of stocks growth stocks (according to analyst forecasts)
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