Yahoo Finance We Think Bearing Lithium (CVE:BRZ) Can Easily Afford To Drive Business Growth
We can readily understand why investors are attracted to unprofitable companies. 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, the natural question for Bearing Lithium (CVE:BRZ) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. For the purpose of this article, we'll define cash burn as the amount of cash the company is spending each year to fund its growth (also called its negative free cash flow). First, we'll determine its cash runway by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves.
View our latest analysis for Bearing Lithium
When Might Bearing Lithium Run Out Of Money?
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 July 2019, Bearing Lithium had cash of CA$509k and no debt. In the last year, its cash burn was CA$3.1k. That means it had a cash runway of very many years as of July 2019. Even though this is but one measure of the company's cash burn, the thought of such a long cash runway warms our bellies in a comforting way. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.
How Is Bearing Lithium's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?
Because Bearing Lithium isn't currently generating revenue, we consider it an early-stage business. Nonetheless, we can still examine its cash burn trajectory as part of our assessment of its cash burn situation. From a cash flow perspective, it's great to see the company's cash burn dropped by 100% over the last year. While that hardly points to growth potential, it does at least suggest the company is trying to survive. Admittedly, we're a bit cautious of Bearing Lithium due to its lack of significant operating revenues. So we'd generally prefer stocks from this list of stocks that have analysts forecasting growth.
How Easily Can Bearing Lithium Raise Cash?
There's no doubt Bearing Lithium's rapidly reducing cash burn brings comfort, but even if it's only hypothetical, it's always worth asking how easily it could raise more money to fund further growth. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. 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.
Bearing Lithium has a market capitalisation of CA$10.0m and burnt through CA$3.1k last year, which is 0.03% of the company's market value. So it could almost certainly just borrow a little to fund another year's growth, or else easily raise the cash by issuing a few shares.
How Risky Is Bearing Lithium's Cash Burn Situation?
As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about Bearing Lithium's cash burn. In particular, we think its cash burn reduction stands out as evidence that the company is well on top of its spending. But it's fair to say that its cash burn relative to its market cap was also very reassuring. After taking into account the various metrics mentioned in this report, we're pretty comfortable with how the company is spending its cash. Notably, our data indicates that Bearing Lithium insiders have been trading the shares. You can discover if they are buyers or sellers by clicking on this link.
Of course Bearing Lithium may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of companies boasting high return on equity, or this list of stocks that insiders are buying.
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