We can readily understand why investors are attracted to unprofitable companies. For example, biotech and mining exploration companies often lose money for years before finding success with a new treatment or mineral discovery. Nonetheless, only a fool would ignore the risk that a loss making company burns through its cash too quickly.

Given this risk, we thought we'd take a look at whether Stavely Minerals (ASX:SVY) shareholders should be worried about its cash burn. In this article, we define cash burn as its annual (negative) free cash flow, which is the amount of money a company spends each year to fund its growth. We'll start by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves in order to calculate its cash runway.

See our latest analysis for Stavely Minerals

Does Stavely Minerals Have A Long Cash Runway?

You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. In December 2019, Stavely Minerals had AU$18m in cash, and was debt-free. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through AU$7.0m. That means it had a cash runway of about 2.5 years as of December 2019. Arguably, that's a prudent and sensible length of runway to have. You can see how its cash balance has changed over time in the image below. ASX:SVY Historical Debt April 3rd 2020

How Is Stavely Minerals's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

In our view, Stavely Minerals doesn't yet produce significant amounts of operating revenue, since it reported just AU$36k in the last twelve months. Therefore, for the purposes of this analysis we'll focus on how the cash burn is tracking. As it happens, the company's cash burn reduced by 2.4% over the last year, which suggests that management are maintaining a fairly steady rate of business development, albeit with a slight decrease in spending. Stavely Minerals makes us a little nervous due to its lack of substantial operating revenue. We prefer most of the stocks on this list of stocks that analysts expect to grow.



Can Stavely Minerals Raise More Cash Easily?

While Stavely Minerals is showing a solid reduction in its cash burn, it's still worth considering how easily it could raise more cash, even just to fuel faster growth. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. One of the main advantages held by publicly listed companies is that they can sell shares to investors to raise cash to fund growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.

Stavely Minerals's cash burn of AU$7.0m is about 7.9% of its AU$88m market capitalisation. Given that is a rather small percentage, it would probably be really easy for the company to fund another year's growth by issuing some new shares to investors, or even by taking out a loan.

So, Should We Worry About Stavely Minerals's Cash Burn?

As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about Stavely Minerals's cash burn. In particular, we think its cash runway stands out as evidence that the company is well on top of its spending. Its weak point is its cash burn reduction, but even that wasn't too bad! Considering all the factors discussed in this article, we're not overly concerned about the company's cash burn, although we do think shareholders should keep an eye on how it develops. Separately, we looked at different risks affecting the company and spotted 6 warning signs for Stavely Minerals (of which 2 are potentially serious!) you should know about.

Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this freelist of interesting companies, and this list of stocks growth stocks (according to analyst forecasts)

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at [email protected]. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.