This week’s Bulls N’ Bears Runner of the Week is … LiveHire. Its share price jumped 95.83 per cent on news of it entering a bid implementation agreement for an all-cash takeover offer priced at 4.5 cents per share – an impressive 75.8 per cent premium to its 30-day volume-weighted average price (VWAP). Other movers and shakers this week were Artemis Resources, LTR Pharma and Noxopharm.
The world’s greatest athletic carnival, the Olympic Games, has again been run and won and leaves behind a string of memorable performances from the glittering city of Paris.
Whether it was the big splash made by our women’s swimming team, the extraordinary paddling power of the Fox sisters, or even our very own breakdancing queen affectionately known as “Raygun”, we now eagerly look forward to what Los Angeles can produce in 2028.
Here at Runners, we always keep a close eye on such proceedings and look for parallels between the world-class competition that took place in France and the world-beating performances of our local sharemarket champions.
It would be easy to argue that the “real” runners this week were those marathoners pounding the streets of Paris for the gruelling 42.195km. Running one of the toughest courses ever presented for an Olympic marathon, with a series of brutal uphill and downhill slopes, the cream rose to the top at the end of the race in a similar fashion to what happens on our sharemarket each week.
You only take gold in Runners of the Week if you have put in a stellar performance and sometimes it goes to companies that have managed to stay the course, in a vein akin to a marathoner, during tough economic times. We also have a mythical wall similar to the one that faces athletes in the new Olympic sport of speed-climbing – but it is share price percentage gain rather than speed that is rewarded with the gold.
The company that scampered up best to stand atop the podium this week is recruitment firm LiveHire, which saw its share price climb – pun intended – an impressive 95.83 per cent.
Humanforce, a company claiming to provide market-leading, employee-focused, intelligent human capital management technology, has submitted an unconditional on-market, all-cash takeover bid for LiveHire, offering to buy at 4.5c per share. That company’s management has appointed a local securities firm to buy as many LiveHire shares as possible that are offered on-market for sale, helping boost share volume to more than 82 million on Wednesday and 21 million on Thursday – levels never seen before in the company’s trading volumes.
The all-cash bid propelled its shares from last week’s close of 2.4c to touch as high as 4.7c on Wednesday, surpassing the takeover price.
A few arbitrage types may have suspected a bid from another rival might have been forthcoming, or that Humanforce may need to up the ante somewhat to take the coveted prize. In any case, the directors at LiveHire have unanimously recommended that shareholders accept the offer in the absence of a superior proposal, so whether any increased offer plays out remains to be seen.
LiveHire was launched in 2012 with the aim of turning the recruitment sector on its head. Instead of the tried-and-true method of employers advertising their positions and potential employees trying to win the gold and be awarded the position, the company offered the employee market the opportunity to set up their resume and skills on its technological platform, advertising their availability and suitability for various selected positions.
As an aside, this columnist once secured a mining production position with Gina Rinehart’s massive Roy Hill iron ore operation after using the LiveHire site and listing positions and parameters desired such as income and preferred roster way back in 2018. So, clearly, it works.
Taking silver this week is Artemis Resources, which wowed the market with news of super-high-grade rock chips going more than a stunning 10,000 grams per tonne of gold from its Titan prospect that is part of the wider Karratha gold project.
A trio of the company’s rock-chip samples were more than the laboratory could assay correctly due to the level of grade encountered, causing the lab to classify them as “overlimit” samples. The classification is assigned when samples return greater than 1 per cent gold, which is equivalent to 10kg of gold per tonne.
Artemis’ share price rallied on the back of the reveal of the assays, racing from 0.9c to touch a high of 1.7c – an impressive 88.89 per cent lift – with a whopping 43.4 million shares changing hands on Thursday.
The samples from the Titan ground are considered essentially to be a greenfields find as previous exploration work at the site was limited. Titan sits near the company’s Carlow deposit that hosts a JORC-compliant mineral resource of 374,000 ounces of gold.
To add further spice to the discovery of high-grade gold within the rock-chip sampling, Artemis divulged that a bulk sample of 300kg of ore was removed and then sorted, crushed, separated and the gold extracted. The company produced an astonishing 10.4-ounce gold bar from the bulk sample, which according to today’s price in local currency amounts to an impressive $38,625.
To provide a further “kick” to Artemis’ share price, it was revealed that high-grade copper was also returned from the assays, with samples grading 23.8 per cent and 14.55 per cent, respectively.
That leads us to the bronze medal, which is awarded to pharmaceutical development company LTR Pharma after it announced a co-development agreement with Aptar Pharma to push ahead with the primary goal of commercialising its lead product SPONTAN in the United States and other key markets. SPONTAN is a rapidly-absorbing, fast-acting erectile dysfunction drug that can assist … ahem … with improving men’s sexual health in relationships.
The news saw the company’s shares … ahem, again … lift on much healthier volumes, trading as many as 5.9 million units on Tuesday and going from a close of 82c last week to reach $1.44 – a 75.61 per cent improvement.
LTR’s product is used via intranasal delivery technology and a recent clinical trial shows SPONTAN achieves more rapid absorption and onset of action compared to well-known oral inhibitors such as sildenafil (Viagra) that promote the same outcome. Sildenafil falls within a class of medications known as phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibitors.
Aptar is considered a global leader in drug delivery systems and services, assisting many companies in obtaining vital combination drug device product approvals using its nasal delivery systems from regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
LTR notes that since the success of the trial, medical providers have started prescribing SPONTAN locally, which is no doubt helping to put a big smile in many Australian bedrooms.
Just missing out on the podium this week, but still rising a promising 64.47 per cent, is innovative cancer-fighting biotech company Noxopharm. Its shares jumped from 7.6c to touch 12.5c Tuesday on a much higher than normal volume of 6.4 million shares.
Noxopharm revealed encouraging new data for its “CRO-67” pre-clinical drug designed to combat pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is especially difficult to treat because tumours are surrounded by a dense barrier of cells, creating treatment difficulties for anti-cancer drugs and the body’s own immune system.
Not to be upstaged by the world’s biggest mixed martial arts promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), hitting Western Australia for its latest show, Noxopharm delivered its own “octagon-like” one-two punch combo in a bid to flatten the insidious disease.
The new data, the result of research as part of an ongoing collaboration with the world-leading cancer team at UNSW Sydney, showed that CRO-67 significantly reduces tumour volume after an in-vivo mice trial and also slowed down the rate of tumour growth – a double blow to the nasty cells.
In addition, the data showed the drug to be effective in an advanced human patient pancreatic tumour explant model. Effectively, that means the testwork involved human pancreatic cancer cells and barrier cells being transplanted into the pancreas of mice.
The transplanting of cells goes beyond most studies as it involves replicating human pancreatic cancer more closely by growing a human tumour and the barrier cells around the tumour site in mice, therefore mimicking the intricate tumour environment found in humans.
As one of many people who have lost close relatives to the terrible disease, I say more power to Noxopharm and wish them continued success with their all-important trials.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
