The Breville (ASX: BRG) share price is currently up 11% after the appliance business made a few announcements yesterday evening.
Breville was established in Melbourne in 1932 as a radio manufacturer, but during the 1960s the focus shifted to household products and kitchen appliances. Breville Group Ltd now includes the brands Breville, Kambrook, Sage and several others, and the products range from toasted sandwich makers to vacuum cleaners.
Here’s what Breville announced
The international company announced two different things:
Breville’s trading update
COVID-19 is not having a negative impact on the company’s operations. At a group level, Breville has achieved 32% revenue growth from 1 January 2020 to 30 April 2020. Growth in March and April was 25% and 21% respectively.
Despite the strong trading, Breville has implemented “prudent, tactical actions” to manage costs and cashflows. Breville has managed to find $5 million a month in cash savings so far.
The company assesses its bad debts each month and is likely to increase the provision. In May a charge of $4.5 million will be taken for a customer entering voluntary administration. At the end of April, excluding that customer, 91% of remaining receivables is either insured or relates to to large multinational customers which are deemed low risk. Breville may write down asset values at the year end.
At 30 April 2020 it had net cash of $10 million with cash on hand of $74 million.
Capital raising
Breville also announced it was undertaking a fully underwritten $94 million institutional placement and a $10 million underwritten share purchase plan.
It’s doing the capital raising because its lender said refinancing $373 million is subject to completing the capital raising. The capital raising price is $17, which was a 9.1% discount to the last closing price of $18.70.
Summary
Breville seems to be one of the best mid cap shares on the ASX, it’s still performing well. If I could take part in the offer I would – these cheap capital raisings are attractive. But I’m not sure if it’s a buy for non-shareholders, there could be a slowdown in sales in the coming months. I’d rather buy these technology shares:
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Disclosure: at the time of publishing, Jaz does not have a financial interest in any of the companies mentioned.