Albion Venture Capital Trust PLC: Interim Manag...

Albion Venture Capital Trust PLC: Interim Management Statement

ALBION VENTURE CAPITAL TRUST PLC

LEI Code: 213800JKELS32V2OK421
Interim Management Statement

Introduction

I present Albion Venture Capital Trust PLC (the “Company”)’s interim management statement for the period from 1 October 2022 to 31 December 2022.

Performance and dividends

As announced on 23 February 2023, the Company's unaudited net asset value (NAV) as at 31 December 2022 was £66.8 million or 51.39 pence per share (excluding treasury shares). This represents a decrease of 1.51 pence per share (2.85%) since 30 September 2022.

After accounting for the second interim dividend for the year ending 31 March 2023 of 1.32 pence per share paid on 31 January 2023 to shareholders on the register on 6 January 2023, the NAV is 50.07 pence per share.

Albion VCTs Prospectus Top Up Offers 2022/23

The Company launched a prospectus top up offer of new Ordinary shares on 10 October 2022.

The proceeds of the Offer will be used to provide further resources to our existing portfolio and to enable us to take advantage of new investment opportunities being seen.

During the period from 1 October 2022 to 31 December 2022, the Company issued the following new Ordinary shares of nominal value 1 penny per share under the Albion VCTs Prospectus Top Up Offers 2022/23:

Date Number of shares issued Issue price per share (including costs of issue) Net proceeds

£’000
2 December 2022 10,397,152 53.8p – 54.3p 5,506

Portfolio
The following investments have been made during the period from 1 October 2022 to 31 December 2022:

New investments £000s Activity
Peppy Health 1,207 Employee digital healthcare platform for underserved health and wellness areas
Diffblue 343 AI for code testing/writing platform
PetsApp 286 Veterinary software
5Mins AI 229 Bite-sized workplace learning platform
Ramp Software 227 Software platform automating revenue and customer forecasting
Tem Energy 154 Energy trading platform
InFact Systems 80 Technology for credit assessment
Total new investments 2,526  


Further investments £000s Activity
Healios 839 Provider of an online platform delivering family centric psychological care primarily to children and adolescents
Perchpeek 64 Digital relocation platform
Brytlyt 58  A GPU database software provider
Total further investments 961  

Top ten holdings (as at 31 December 2022)

Investment Carrying value

£000’s
% of net asset value Activity
Chonais River Hydro 4,311 6.5% Owner and operator of a 2 MW hydro-power scheme in the Scottish Highlands.
Cantab Research (T/A Speechmatics) 2,939 4.4% Provider of low footprint automated speech recognition which can be deployed in the cloud, on premise or on device.
The Evewell Group 2,460 3.7% Operator and developer of women’s health centres focusing on fertility.
Radnor House School (TopCo) 2,437 3.6% Independent school for children aged 2-18.
Seldon Technologies 2,212 3.3% Software company that enables enterprises to deploy Machine Learning models in production.
Threadneedle Software Holdings (T/A Solidatus) 2,030 3.0% Provider of data lineage software to enterprise customers in regulated sectors.
Gravitee TopCo (T/A Gravitee.io) 1,915 2.9% API management platform.
Elliptic Enterprises 1,913 2.9% Provider of Anti Money Laundering services to digital asset institutions.
Healios 1,856 2.8% Provider of an online platform delivering family centric psychological care primarily to children and adolescents.
The Voucher Market (T/A WeGift) 1,855 2.8% A cloud platform that enables corporates to purchase digital gift cards and to distribute them to employees and customers.

A full breakdown of the Company’s portfolio can be found on the Company’s webpage on the Manager’s website at www.albion.capital/funds/AAVC.

Share buy-backs

During the period from 1 October 2022 to 31 December 2022, the Company purchased 680,035 Ordinary shares at a cost of £343,000 including stamp duty. These shares are to be held in treasury.

It remains the Board’s policy to buy back shares in the market, subject to the overall constraint that such purchases are in the Company’s interest, including the maintenance of sufficient resources for investment in existing and new portfolio companies and the continued payment of dividends to shareholders.

It is the Board’s intention for such buy-backs to be at around a 5% discount to net asset value, so far as market conditions and liquidity permit.

Material events and transactions after the period end

On 21 February 2023, the Company was pleased to announce that it had reached its £11 million over-allotment limit under its Offer which was fully subscribed and closed to further applications.

On 24 February 2023, the Board announced that, under advice, it had delayed the proposed date of the second allotment of shares in light of recent developments in the Albion managed portfolio. These developments were assessed as having no impact on the NAV of the Company.

There have been no other material events or transactions after the period end to the date of this announcement.

Further information

The Company continues to offer a dividend reinvestment scheme to existing shareholders. Details of this Scheme can be found at www.albion.capital/funds/AAVC.

Further information regarding historic and current financial performance and other useful shareholder information can be found on the Company’s webpage on the Manager’s website at www.albion.capital/funds/AAVC.


Richard Glover, Chairman

2 March 2023

 

For further information please contact:

Vikash Hansrani

Operations Partner

Albion Capital Group LLP

Telephone: 020 7601 1850


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