Read, get yourself Educated. Not asking you to buy. Just cannot stand the misconception of " abalone company" and " after CNY, no more abalone" .

 

Oceanus is a Buy at 0.043 if you believe in (a) their vision, (b) their leader and management, (c) the scale of the problem they are trying to solve.

 

Overvalued at 4.3 cents? Looking at revenue/profit & EPS of course. But this is like saying a kid who flunk PSLE, worked hard for 4 Years, become Top 20 Students in O Levels, then A Levels went on to be Top 10 Kid. This Kid then said I have the ambition to be the Elon Musk of Singapore, Tesla of Foodtech. His peers perhaps all along PSLE steady, O Levels decent, A Levels decent perhaps asking 1/10th his Value. You ca say pass on, why take the risk, but you can also take the Leap of Faith, pay him the 10x value when it could possibly return u 100x.

 

I leave you with some of the Oceanus CEO recent interview with the Edge Singapore, also attached the PDF.

 

Oceanus AWAITS exit from watchlist and PREPS for food production ventures

 

Note: AWAITS = More or less certain, waiting for the inevitable

 

PREPS = 养 兵 千 日 waiting to strike

 

 

 

Bank

A decade ago, Oceanus, under a previous management team, was keeling over a disastrous near wipe-out of its abalone farming business in China. As the extent of the damage became apparent, one of its creditors, a local bank, appointed liquidators to get ready to wade in and take the company to the cleaners.

 

Now, in a sign of how the tide has turned, Oceanus&rsquo CEO Peter Koh was recently invited to the same bank&rsquo s Lunar New Year celebration and stood next to the bank&rsquo s CEO for lo hei.

 

Broker

Koh recalls how when Oceanus acquired a media production business amid the longdrawn turnaround, the decision was not well received. A major brokerage took the view that Oceanus was merely grasping at any business it could get its hands on just to stay in business, and curbed the buying of Oceanus shares. Three months ago, a senior staff from the brokerage came by. &ldquo My boss asked me to get to know a bit more about your company,&rdquo Koh recalls his visitor saying.

 

 

Looking back at the restructuring journey, Koh notes with no small measure of satisfaction that this milestone of achieving full-year profitability was something he has spent years slogging towards. &ldquo Let&rsquo s put it this way, how can we not know what&rsquo s our destiny? We really have to get out of the watchlist and one basic criterion is that we need to be profitable,&rdquo says Koh in an interview with The Edge Singapore, referring to the status under which troubled mainboard-listed companies are classified.

 

 

Oceanus now operates like a landlord instead. It leases the tanks to other abalone farmers to use for a three-year period at a rate of RMB1,800 ($370) per year. It also helped undertake some contract farming operations. Last year, Oceanus generated revenue of some $4 million from this business, while bearing minimal operational risks. The bulk of Oceanus&rsquo turnover for FY2020, of $84.7 million, was from its relatively new regional distribution business which is a joint venture with a Chinese partner, Season Hong. In the preceding year, turnover from distribution was just $6.5 million.

 

 

 

If Koh can have his way, there is a lot more room to grow, as Oceanus expands its distribution network of both suppliers and customers. He believes that being a Singapore company with a distribution joint venture in China puts Oceanus in a very good stead. The regional heads of multinational FMCG companies &mdash companies eyeing ways to reach the more than one billion Chinese consumers &mdash have a big job title but they are still employees, end of the day.

 

As such, their biggest priority is not to have any nasty surprises popping up on them. &ldquo You guys have the transparency and governance, while at the same time, the distribution into China will give me my numbers,&rdquo he reasons, referring to the inherent credibility of being a Singapore company.

 

 

Telsa of FoodTech

 

Is the run in the share price justified? Koh declined to comment, but he has both big plans and a clear idea of how he wants to grow Oceanus. He characterised the time he spent as CEO of the company into three distinct phases: clean up, build up, and, from this year onwards, &ldquo tech-up&rdquo &mdash aiming to be the Tesla of FoodTech and tapping new technologies to change the food industry at both production and distribution levels.

 

Last year, while the pandemic caused many companies to struggle, it had a different impact on Oceanus &mdash the supply chain disruptions jolted countries and even individual cities to pay a lot more attention to their food security.

To this end, Koh aims to set up a series of Oceanus Food Tech Hubs across the region. The company, over the years, has developed ties with researchers from various universities and polytechnics to create newer and more efficient and innovative ways of farming. The hubs will be where the new techniques are put to paces on a commercial scale.

 

 

 

Koh says he will not be taking sole ownership of these hubs or committing significant capital expenditure to build and run these food hubs on his own. Rather, he will make it a point to partner with local governments or related local parties.

 

Koh sees himself like Hyatt, managing a chain of hotels &mdash but instead of receiving a management fee, Oceanus will own minority stakes in the various hubs. This concept was already something Koh had in mind back in 2017, he says, but the priority then was to restructure the company. As such, the pandemic has, in a way, accelerated the rolling out of this concept. Koh adds there are talks with various potential parties but he is careful not to overstretch.

 

 

Koh plans to introduce key high-tech features into the platform that traditional players cannot be bothered with. For example, the produce will be tacked to a blockchain network so that there can be full traceability throughout the supply chain.

 

 

Koh envisions Oceanus to be the new model of how the food business should be run: combining both the production and distribution networks in one self-reinforcing loop. While Oceanus is focused on seafood, there is nothing stopping it from expanding into the production and distribution of other produce, he reasons.

 

 

Even so, Koh is making sure Oceanus remains a name associated with this product. He explains that abalone is Oceanus&rsquo s pedigree, and given how other producers in China want to license Oceanus&rsquo brand name to sell their own products, this is a brand name that has accumulated a certain level of cachet. &ldquo We started off with abalone, and we don&rsquo t want to lose that. And this pedigree is not losing money,&rdquo he says.

 

 

DYODD.