Alphawave’s Full-year Results Are Delayed

Remember Alphawave?

In 2021, the once Toronto-based semiconductor IP company IPO’d on the LSE to great fanfare, with some drawing comparisons between its capital-light business model and previous stock exchange darling ARM. The valuation, at £3bn for a company with just £40mn of trailing revenues, matched the hype.

Then it all went a bit pear shaped. Four months after its May listing, the stock was cut in half after FT Alphaville revealed close, and undisclosed, relationships between it and some of its key customers. Since, the stock has been muted, even after it announced in March that it was buying high-speed connectivity IP business OpenFive for $210mn

That is, until a RNS landed Thursday morning regarding its forthcoming full-year results for 2021. From the release:

LONDON, United Kingdom and TORONTO, Ontario, Canada, 14 April, 2022 — Alphawave IP (LN: AWE, ‘the Company’), a global leader in high-speed connectivity for the world’s technology infrastructure announces that it will be reporting its full-year results on 29 April 2022. The results will also include a trading update for the first quarter of 2022. The 29 April 2022 reporting date represents a short one-week delay and further delays are not expected.
Due to COVID-related staff absences, the Company’s auditor, KPMG LLP, has requested additional time to finalise their procedures.

Despite the seemingly innocuous nature of this delay it’s fair to say, with the stock down 15 per cent to 157p in today’s trading, the market is clearly a little bit jittery about Alphawave’s first full-year audited results.

To give you a sense of just how focused investors are on the company’s related party relationships, Alphawave felt the need to disclose this:

Related Party Disclosures
KPMG LLP is not a related party of Alphawave IP. All related parties in this press release have been previously disclosed.

Good to cover all bases, we guess.