Alterra Power MGMXD

Shareholders Meeting & Comments

[BoldForbes]

I attended the shareholders meeting on Tuesday.  It was interesting to see the personalities of the management team.  It seemed as if 1/3 of the room was employees and management team and 2/3s was shareholders.  Jay Sutton appears to be pretty solid and knowledgeable; glad he is running hydro. 

Management is building expectations.  The old rule goes, ‘manage expectations’; especially if you set them.  They built up Shannon and then came in flat; although I do believe Shannon will be a solid asset.  But if it is not currency exchange one quarter, it is alumni the next or now gas prices in TX…I hope management can meet or exceed the expectations they are setting.

The second quarter call was hard to hear after attending a good shareholders meeting in which management tried to be energetic.  I guess they decided to smile while talking in delivering bad news?  'We missed expectations, but boy is everything going to be great'…just paraphrasing what I heard…

I don’t still don’t understand this talk about a dividend.  With $9.6M in cash and $5.9 of it in Iceland where will the money come from to issue?   If there are great future opportunities, why not reinvest the cash flow into more projects to produce larger future profits.  The company is probably 2-3 years of growth away from a dividend.  Oh, and please don’t start something, like a dividend, that you cannot continue…especially if you are doing it to maximize shareholder price and value (google "gas and oil dividends halted")

The company appears to be a hybrid of a developer of power plants and an operator.  Developers build and then sell the power plant.  Operators generally produce and issue dividends.  With a little patience we can be both in a growing industry, with experience and a good operational reputation.  Seems like it would be a great place to be!

Patience and frustration are my words at the moment.  A little more patience for the vision I can see for the company in the future; which seems to be getting a little further away.  Frustrated due seeing value where others cannot.  Ross mentioned this at the shareholders meeting; that the Iceland assets were basically not valued in the share price.

So is it a value trap or a buying opportunity?

Just like Newstock44, I am not selling (I don't indend to either); unlike Newstock44 I might nibble if the price becomes opportunistic.  After all, there is a roadshow coming to share the value proposition of Alterra.  I hope we have a 2Q2016 profit to be a part of the road show story.

As all good racing horses do, running in circles on this one,

Bold Forbes

[carinthian]

Not sure how biased he is but Rick Rule mentioned it on BNN yesterday I guess. Was his past pick, is down 15% or so since then but he likes it. It is not making a lot of free cash flow (so I agree regrading the dividend) but it is paying down a lot of debt instead. So I would not mind another 2 years until they actually do a dividend because I think as long as they can find projects with 10-15

[BoldForbes]

Carinthian,  I believe the company appears to have all of the pieces coming together, just the timing; patience is a virtue. Power plants operating => check! Seasoned operators at the power plants to run them effeciently => mostly check I believe Power plants coming online => check! Power plants in development => check! Pipeline projects and opportunity => check

[carinthian]

Fully agree on all your points. The thing they should work on I guess is communication because as it seems the communication so far led to expectations of reatil investors being too high... Just my personal thoughts. DYODD. carinthian