Nokia 3Q21 results, Orbital Full Moon terms, Intel OMIBs & trading notes +3

01:40 28-Oct-21


Nokia has reported is third quarter results:
Dollar figures were calculated by me at the recent €/$1.16 rate.  These figures seem good but hardly game changing and management is the latest to say the business has ongoing supply chain constraints, as well as North American headwinds.  The conference call is at 4:30am.  However, I am unlikely to prioritize any follow-up as NOK seems already fairly valued and the market typically ignores the interim reports anyway.  The most interesting thing may be to if this garners any reaction from swarm traders on American markets.
 
Orbital has filed the 8-K for its Full Moon acquisition.  It provides some of the detail that should have been present in the original announcement:

Unfortunately, there's no specifics on what Oribital is getting in return, other than the expertise of the two founders.  I would typically expect $250-300K in recurring annual revenue to justify the $1.9M purchase price, but I wouldn't be shocked if Orbital is simply attempting to learn some of the finer points of the business it is rushing into.  The only things I can say for sure is that the purchase represents about 13% of Orbital's most recently reported capital, leaving about $8.4M, and that I remain uninterested in OEG.

Similarly, Intel management bought about 50K shares on the open market yesterday.  Here's the link to the SEC search results in case anyone wants the breakdown, but I'm going to move on to investment-worthy comments by reiterating my optimism for Himax.  Even if the numbers somehow disappoint, I'll point out that TSM's CEO can be correct and biased at the same time, and this is all the more true in the face infrastructure negotiations narrowing down to about the half that I'd estimated.  The latest associated tax proposal looks politically & BGCP expedient, but an implementation nightmare.

The wrangling is finally being pushed to a resolution because COP26 starts next week, which is probably skewing the media toward renewable energy and away from fossil fuels.  Laudable as that trend is in the real world, it's prices that matter with investments, including American natural gas back over $6 again, even as TTF and JKM have moderated.  I see this as a step towards stability and global pricing.  The transition from development to profitability is always tricky, but I find NFE below $30 worthwhile.  Xebec isn't even fossil-based, but its transition is more speculative.  Still, prices around $2 seem cheap.

Finally, there is some evidence that traders are favoring LUMN options over the shares, though not as much as we saw with HIMX.  That could temporarily reverse assuming the dividend is confirmed, but range trading is probably back until the business can start to show growth.  I expect that sooner than most as the economy reopens, but still not necessarily in next week's report.