Worsley Investors (WINV) reported its annual results for its financial year ending 31 March 2024.
- NAV per share decreased slightly by 1.07% to 43.45p with total assets decreasing marginally from £15.23m to £15.09m. Its share price declined 11.43% to 24.80p, increasing the discount to NAV to 42.92%. Its NAV significantly underperformed the FTSE All Share, which was up 8.43%.
- Profit for the year was £0.030 million, down from £1.031 million the previous year.
- WINV’s equity portfolio, composed of listed UK small caps and an investment in an Italian cinema, returned approximately 2.3% on opening capital.
- WINV reported a 3% reduction in NAV due to central expenses.
- The Italian cinema property generated gross income over €1 million, but this was offset by expenses and adverse FX movements. WINV continues to seek an optimal disposal value for this asset.
- No dividends were paid or declared.
WINV’s chairman Robert Burke commented:
“When presenting our September Half Year results to September, released in December, I observed that we were close to the peak of this interest rate cycle and that funding costs in certain sectors were already beginning to fall. During the first quarter of 2024, the final quarter of our reporting period, while the conviction strengthened that, absent unforeseen extraneous events, the peak had already been seen it also became apparent that interest rates were not going to fall as soon or as quickly as the markets, or we had hoped. The effect, of course, was that markets gave up some of their earlier gains and several of our holdings were no exception. Whilst the larger capitalisation stocks in general slowly recovered through the latter half of the final quarter, smaller stocks were as usual left behind.
“I also observed that Worsley Investors runs a concentrated portfolio of investments, each of which has the capacity either of its own volition or with encouragement to generate significant shareholder value in absolute terms. One of the effects of such concentration is that, depending on the timing of events in relation to each of such investees and conversely those in relation to the principal constituents of market proxy indices, Worsley Investors’ performance can diverge from wider market moves from reporting period to reporting period even when investees’ underlying commercial performance is significantly better than market averages.
“The early cycle remains in our favour when looking out to the next two or three years and that provides a good background for our investees to realise shareholder value – as we have seen with Smiths News, for example. That, and compounding the cash from Curno, has got us off to a good start to the current year. As at the time of writing, our NAV in pence per share, is somewhere in the upper 40s. Our share price has not yet begun to follow the rise in NAV and so the percentage discount of our share price to that NAV is also somewhere in the mid to upper 40s. Given the stage of the business cycle at which we are, on those metrics, we are very excited about the future.”