Companies: AINC    BML    CMGP    LGO   

With almost half the year gone, what better time to catch up with AIM new issues. I assess the best, and the worst, performers so far.

Entrepreneurial broker and nomad Beaumont Cornish has had best price performance amongst AIM players this year, with the ventures it has floated – Commercial Group Properties (CGP), Leni Gas & Oil and Bramlin – having posted respective gains of 165, 100 and 65 per cent since listing. How much of this is down to the prospects of its charges and how much to the pricing of the various issues is a question that only time will be able to truly answer.

Property developer CGP raised £1.5 million at float with the aim of developing property in the South East. Its 402 acres across three sites were valued independently at £28 million and a fourth site has since been added for £5 million. Led by experienced property hand Ken Wills and former Grant Thornton bigwig Brian Moritz, CGP was subsequently put in charge of implementing part of an agreement between the South East England Development Agency and an agency for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Chinamex, to build a series of business parks. CGP recently reaped the first reward from this accord, unveiling a ten-year lease with a Chinese partner for one million square feet at its site near Ramsgate.

Rags to riches

Leni Gas & Oil, the 40 per cent-owned vehicle of entrepreneurial Lonrho boss David Lenigas, enjoyed take-off from day one, with demand doubling the 3p issue price before any news was out. A deal has since been signed to buy a share of AIM peer Mediterranean Oil & Gas’s exploration assets offshore Malta.

Oil and gas investor Bramlin, where experienced Aussie miner John Killer grips the tiller, has peppered the market with even less news flow – none to be precise – yet the shares have advanced sharply from 10p to 16.5p.

While all of the above have done rather well, adviser Nabarro Wells promoted the company with the single most impressive share price rise. Indeed, the 218 per cent surge at Applied Intellectual Capital (AIC), a California-based investor in environmentally focused technology, has provided a welcome palliative for Anglo-American small-cap relations following some rather second-rate AIM arrivals from the US last year.

One of AIC’s most exciting technologies, Metal Mediated Redox, has successfully created ethanol fuel from the digestion of waste cotton feedstock and piqued interest
from major global corporations. Furthermore, AIC has recently joined up with another US-based company for a six-month research project for a group of car manufacturers including Ford and General Motors. AIC lost $2 million (£1 million) before tax in the six months to the end of January on $1.2 million turnover but still has the majority of the £20 million it raised at float in January. The shares could have further to go.

No refuge

This year’s only new issue to have truly bombed is Full List refugee GeneMedix, bought by the life sciences arm of India’s largest private company, Reliance Industries, and subsequently moved to AIM. Advised by Ernst & Young and with The Share Centre as broker, this biopharmaceutical company has not found much refuge on the junior market, shedding 63.5 per cent of its value since its arrival. This seems to have been caused by the troubled company’s restructuring and the cancellation of its Singapore listing. But, as the company now has heavyweight backing to bring products to market and product trials are under way, the fall could prove a peculiar phenomenon.