Yahoo Finance We Think International Tower Hill Mines (TSE:ITH) Can Afford To Drive Business Growth
Just because a business does not make any money, does not mean that the stock will go down. For example, although software-as-a-service business Salesforce.com lost money for years while it grew recurring revenue, if you held shares since 2005, you'd have done very well indeed. But the harsh reality is that very many loss making companies burn through all their cash and go bankrupt.
So, the natural question for International Tower Hill Mines (TSE:ITH) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of 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 International Tower Hill Mines
When Might International Tower Hill Mines Run Out Of Money?
A cash runway is defined as the length of time it would take a company to run out of money if it kept spending at its current rate of cash burn. When International Tower Hill Mines last reported its balance sheet in June 2019, it had zero debt and cash worth US$8.3m. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through US$4.0m. Therefore, from June 2019 it had 2.1 years of cash runway. Arguably, that's a prudent and sensible length of runway to have. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.
How Is International Tower Hill Mines's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?
Because International Tower Hill Mines isn't currently generating revenue, we consider it an early-stage business. So while we can't look to sales to understand growth, we can look at how the cash burn is changing to understand how expenditure is trending over time. As it happens, the company's cash burn reduced by 6.3% over the last year, which suggests that management are maintaining a fairly steady rate of business development, albeit with a slight decrease in spending. Admittedly, we're a bit cautious of International Tower Hill Mines due to its lack of significant operating revenues. We prefer most of the stocks on this list of stocks that analysts expect to grow.
How Hard Would It Be For International Tower Hill Mines To Raise More Cash For Growth?
While International Tower Hill Mines is showing a solid reduction in its cash burn, it's still worth considering how easily it could raise more cash, even just to fuel faster growth. Generally speaking, a listed business can raise new cash through issuing shares or taking on debt. Many companies end up issuing new shares to fund future growth. By comparing a company's annual cash burn to its total market capitalisation, we can estimate roughly how many shares it would have to issue in order to run the company for another year (at the same burn rate).
International Tower Hill Mines's cash burn of US$4.0m is about 4.0% of its CA$131m market capitalisation. Given that is a rather small percentage, it would probably be really easy for the company to fund another year's growth by issuing some new shares to investors, or even by taking out a loan.
So, Should We Worry About International Tower Hill Mines's Cash Burn?
As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about International Tower Hill Mines's cash burn. For example, we think its cash burn relative to its market cap suggests that the company is on a good path. On this analysis its cash burn reduction was its weakest feature, but we are not concerned about it. 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 International Tower Hill Mines CEO is paid..
If you would prefer to check out another company with better fundamentals, then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt or this list of stocks which are all forecast to grow.
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