Word on the street tells me Intema Solutions (ITM.V), which has been trade halted for a few months while the regulators go through their raft of recent transactions, is about to go free trading again any day.
To be clear: The stock will drop when it does.
That’s no beef against ITM – which is a client of ours – it’s just a reality for stocks that have been halted for a decent length of time, long enough for holders to get annoyed that their money is tied up. In Intema’s case, that situation is added to by the fact a financing they did at $0.20 is going to also be free trading when the stock un-halts – with the stock currently pegged at $0.53.
People will take profits. But if you’re new to the Intema story, that’ll be a feature, not a bug.
When Intema halted, it was on an absolute tear. We’d announced it to the world as a company set on building an e-sports ecosystem that would involve owning a team, owning a tournament platform, owning a betting platform, and tying all of that together with as yet unannounced pickups. The company duly went out and delivered on its promises in a way few e-sports deals have.
Congrats to those who got in at $0.12.
And $0.30. Heck, even $0.45.
Their MO:
- Don’t build it, buy it.
- Bring an audience readymade rather than slogging it out in the development trenches.
- Add value to niche properties by bringing them into a bigger property.
I dig. And so did the market, before the regulators did what the regulators do and yeeted that momentum while they sorted out the https://equity.guru/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/tnw8sVO3j-2.png.
If not for that halt, the stock may have run higher still and, in speaking to CEO Laurent Benezra, he sees that stopped streak as being fortuitous.
“Obviously you like to see the stock running, but it can get a bit ahead of itself sometimes and we were probably getting close to that territory,” Benezra told me yesterday. “The halt gave us some time to breathe, build the business, and maybe even miss some downward sector pressure that our competitors felt hard.”
That’s a truth. Just look at one time industry darling Real Luck Group, aka Luckbox, which has watched its market cap eroded since landing on the markets with a splash.
Intema has bought into e-sports marketing agency TheSmack, is acquiring Livestream Gaming, owners of Loot.Bet, for $14.75m, and Fortnite competitors Team Bloodhounds, and previously looked to grabbed Advertiise technologies. HypeX.gg remains one of their early pickups.
All of these combine to create something much larger than the sum of its parts; an e-sports ecosystem in which every piece provides business, revenue, and growth for every other piece, with fans and sponsors piling in at every point. Come to HypeX for a tournament, stick around to play against Team Bloodhounds, in between ads signed by TheSmack, served by Advertiise, and with bets raining down from Loot.bet.
That’s pretty compelling, and may well be enough to break my prediction of ITM’s stock price dropping after it goes back to free trading.
But if it doesn’t, if the stock does indeed slide some on the open, that’ll be an opportunity for folks to get a discounted buy-in price, because this deal looks, smells, and sounds like the template for how to do e-sports right.
— Chris Parry
FULL DISCLOSURE: Intema Solutions is an Equity.Guru marketing client.
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