I wish I had bought
Satellite Solutions Worldwide (Aim: SAT) is an Oxfordshire-based firm offering high-speed satellite broadband to rural areas. It rents capacity from satellite operators and sells it to consumers under the name Europasat.
Business partly depends on UK government subsidies, which are intended to bring faster internet to areas that don’t have access to high-speed networks, and the firm is expanding by buying up operators in other countries that run similar schemes. It now has more than 25,000 customers throughout Europe (mostly in the UK, Ireland, France and Poland), a 126% increase on 2014. It listed on Aim in May 2015. The shares are up by 91% since then.
I wish I had sold
Tanzania-based Fastjet (Aim: FJET) is a no-frills airline that operates between 11 cities from Kenya to South Africa. The firm, which aims to be the continent’s first “pan-African airline”, was born in 2012 out of the aviation interests of the Lonrho conglomerate, and was backed by easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou, whose easyGroup is a major shareholder.
But Haji-Ioannou fell out with the chief executive and general counsel, saying that the firm’s costs were too high. The two executives were ousted in March this year, shortly after the airline warned results would fall “materially short of forecasts”. The combination of boardroom feud and weak earnings has resulted in the share price slumping by more than 50% so far this year.