Small Cap Awards 2023: Dividend Hero Of The Year
The Small Cap Awards is an annual opportunity to recognise outstanding achievement focused on smaller quoted companies.
The Awards ceremony will take place on the 15th June 2023 at The Montcalm Hotel in Central London. The Awards celebrate companies and participants in the sub-£350m market cap quoted company sector on January 1st 2022 or on first day of listing across various categories.
Since it started in mid-2012, the Small Cap Club has successfully enabled leaders and participants in the small-cap sector to meet regularly, based on the premise that meeting people builds trust and creates new areas of thinking and opportunity, and the regular networking events have gone from strength to strength.
This year the Small Cap Awards, in association with Master Investor, are delighted to announce support from Network sponsors Hill Dickinson LLP, a leading international commercial law firm and headline sponsors, haysmacintyre, an award winning firm of chartered accountants and tax advisors who were supporting the awards for the first time this year. Further, valuable support was provided by Aquis, one of only two regulated equity exchanges in the UK, Guild Financial Advisors, an independent corporate finance advisory business, Share Registrars, a CREST enabled registrar, InfinitX, helping transform the growth potential of private companies and The Investor Relations Society, the UK’s professional body for investor relations practitioners. The awards are organised by Master Investor, which specialises in connecting companies and investors.
The shortlist has been selected by a judging panel comprised of leaders in the Small Cap sector and is Chaired by Gervais Williams, Head of Equities at Premier Miton Investors. The full judging panel, award categories and shortlisted companies can be viewed here: 2023 Awards.
The Nominees for Dividend Of The Year are as follows:
Bioventix plc
Bioventix plc is a biotechnology company specialising in the creation and supply of high-affinity sheep monoclonal antibodies (SMAs) for use in immunodiagnostics. The antibody technology laboratory and the team of 11 scientists and 3 support staff are based in Farnham, Surrey, UK.
A leader in its field and focusing on the use of SMAs in clinical diagnostics, drugs of abuse testing and industrial pollution monitoring the Company’s strategy is to identify both new and existing commercial assays for which there is or may be a need for improved antibodies. Bioventix provides customers and research partners with high quality SMAs that address shortcomings of other antibodies. The high-affinity antibodies created at Bioventix have significant advantages over conventional rodent monoclonal antibodies where the target biomarker is present at low concentration, where the target is a short peptide sequence or where the target is a small molecule or drug. In many assay formats, the use of high-affinity SMAs confers improved assay sensitivity and precision thereby improving the speed and accuracy of test results, diagnosis, treatment and thereby patient outcomes.
Bioventix has successfully developed SMAs to targets where conventional monoclonal or polyclonal antibodies have failed to produce a suitable reagent. The Company has, for example, developed antibodies for use in the testing of Vitamin D deficiency and for testing Troponin levels in patients experiencing chest pain and potential cardiac events. The Company supplies antibodies to more than 200 immunodiagnostics companies including all of the multinational, global immunodiagnostics providers who in turn provide supply hospital laboratories across the world.
The company was admitted to trade on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in April 2014. Since when the Company’s revenue has increased by more than 15% year on year with profits quadrupling over the same period and Bioventix now has a market capitalisation of c£190m.
Cerillion plc
Since its IPO in 2016, Cerillion has been one of AIM’s top performing companies.
The Group provides mission-critical software to telecom companies globally. Its software enables telcos to provide their end-customers with a full range of services and the ‘back room’ functionality required to maintain and manage these services.
Companies can buy Cerillion’s entire software suite or individual modules, with software products sold ‘as a service’ (i.e. via the “SaaS” model). New customers pay a single subscription fee for a fixed term, for instance for five or ten years. This fee covers software licences (with the number of licences taken relating to the size of a customer’s own customer base), support, and managed services. The initial implementation of Cerillion’s software takes 12 to 18 months for which service fees are charged. Twice a year, every year, Cerillion releases new software, providing upgrades and added functionality.
Based in London, Cerillion has a 23-year track record in its sector and employs about 330 staff, mainly based in London, India, and Bulgaria. It has approximately 80 customers across 44 countries.
In the last three years, the Company’s rate of growth has increased to c.25% per annum, a significant uplift to previous growth rates. It is winning larger deals with larger customers. This reflects three major factors:
- Cerillion’s increasing profile and market recognition;
- telecom companies’ requirement to monetise their ongoing investment in 5G and broadband infrastructure; and
- growing acceptance of ‘product’ solutions (such as Cerillion’s) and of Software-as-a-Service.
The size of the growth opportunity available to Cerillion is significant; currently its share of its addressable market is very small.
The quality of the Company’s earnings is high, with significant visibility of income and subscription fees providing a solid bedrock of recurring income.
The Company’s balance sheet is very strong, with substantial net cash balance of c.£24 million at 31 March 2023.
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