Action Hotels Plc (LON:AHCG) Chief Financial Officer Katie Shelton caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the appointment of new broker & nomad Zeus Capital
Q1: How are you today Katie?
A1: Very good, thank you. Just got back from the Middle East, overseeing some hotels so pleased to be back but lots going on out there.
Q2: I can imagine. Now Katie, I’ve seen today’s announcement that you’ve appointed a new broker and nomad, could you explain the reason behind this?
A2: Yes, we’ve appointed Zeus Capital this morning as broker and nomad, it’s a house I know very well, obviously they’re dominating the AIM space at the moment with a growing client base and fundraisings and broking capabilities and I’m confident that Zeus will be a good fit for Action and support us in our growth phase.
Q3: Why did your engagement with your former broker and nomad only last for 6 months?
A3: It’s a simple question, we measure our performance on how the share price is doing. The share price was not performing with our previous advisors, our previous brokers and even though we continue to hit the forecast and deliver everything that we said to the market that we would do so we’ve given it 6 months and I’ve decided that they weren’t the right house for us and we’ve moved to Zeus who I think will be a better match.
Q4: Now you mentioned Zeus, they’re very well known for being the biggest fundraiser on the AIM market at the moment, does this change mean that you’re looking to raise more money?
A4: Well Zeus do indeed have a brilliant track record, I think they’ve raised over £2.5 billion in the last 2 years for AIM companies which is very very good. We’re in growth phase, we have 9 hotels in our pipeline but they are all fully funded so we don’t need any more funds to deliver those so this takes us to 3,000 hotel rooms. Our objective, however, is to get to 5,000 hotel rooms by 2020 and we became a public company to use the public market so at some time I expect, well come back and raise new money but at the moment we’re fully funded and don’t need anything to achieve the pipeline.
Q5: You’re approaching your year-end, what should we expect to see before the year’s out?
A5: The team are busy finalising 2 more hotels to be completed by the end of this year, that’s almost 500 rooms and another 500 rooms coming on line with openings early next year. We’ve got another 5 hotels opening the following year so we’re very busy, we’ll update the market in due course as we go down our growth path and we’ll announce our full year results hopefully in April next year.
