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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, the natural question for CSP (NASDAQ:CSPI) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. In this article, we define cash burn as its annual (negative) free cash flow, which is the amount of money a company spends each year to fund its growth. Let's start with an examination of the business's cash, relative to its cash burn.
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How Long Is CSP's Cash Runway?
You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. When CSP last reported its balance sheet in June 2019, it had zero debt and cash worth US$17m. In the last year, its cash burn was US$4.1m. Therefore, from June 2019 it had 4.1 years of cash runway. There's no doubt that this is a reassuringly long runway. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.
How Well Is CSP Growing?
It was quite stunning to see that CSP increased its cash burn by 307% over the last year. As if that's not bad enough, the operating revenue also dropped by 6.2%, making us very wary indeed. In light of the above-mentioned, we're pretty wary of the trajectory the company seems to be on. In reality, this article only makes a short study of the company's growth data. You can take a look at how CSP has developed its business over time by checking this visualization of its revenue and earnings history.
Can CSP Raise More Cash Easily?
While CSP seems to be in a fairly good position, it's still worth considering how easily it could raise more cash, even just to fuel faster growth. Generally speaking, a listed business can raise new cash through issuing shares or taking on debt. 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.
CSP's cash burn of US$4.1m is about 7.3% of its US$56m market capitalisation. That's a low proportion, so we figure the company would be able to raise more cash to fund growth, with a little dilution, or even to simply borrow some money.