Just because a business does not make any money, does not mean that the stock will go down. For example, although Amazon.com made losses for many years after listing, if you had bought and held the shares since 1999, you would have made a fortune. But the harsh reality is that very many loss making companies burn through all their cash and go bankrupt.
So should TNG (ASX:TNG) shareholders be worried about its cash burn? In this report, we will consider the company's annual negative free cash flow, henceforth referring to it as the 'cash burn'. The first step is to compare its cash burn with its cash reserves, to give us its 'cash runway'.
Check out our latest analysis for TNG
How Long Is TNG's Cash Runway?
A company's cash runway is calculated by dividing its cash hoard by its cash burn. When TNG last reported its balance sheet in December 2019, it had zero debt and cash worth AU$16m. In the last year, its cash burn was AU$19m. That means it had a cash runway of around 11 months as of December 2019. That's quite a short cash runway, indicating the company must either reduce its annual cash burn or replenish its cash. Importantly, if we extrapolate recent cash burn trends, the cash runway would be a lot longer. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.
How Is TNG's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?
Although TNG reported revenue of AU$79k last year, it didn't actually have any revenue from operations. That means we consider it a pre-revenue business, and we will focus our growth analysis on cash burn, for now. In fact, it ramped its spending strongly over the last year, increasing cash burn by 164%. That sort of spending growth rate can't continue for very long before it causes balance sheet weakness, generally speaking. TNG makes us a little nervous due to its lack of substantial operating revenue. So we'd generally prefer stocks from this list of stocks that have analysts forecasting growth.
How Easily Can TNG Raise Cash?
Given its cash burn trajectory, TNG shareholders should already be thinking about how easy it might be for it to raise further cash in the future. Companies can raise capital through either debt or equity. Commonly, a business will sell new shares in itself to raise cash to drive growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.
TNG's cash burn of AU$19m is about 27% of its AU$69m market capitalisation. That's fairly notable cash burn, so if the company had to sell shares to cover the cost of another year's operations, shareholders would suffer some costly dilution.