Questor Inheritance Tax Portfolio: investors seemed to have given up on this stock – but new developments have sent the share price sliding
When we wrote last month about Fulcrum Utility Services, we said in essence that things wouldn’t get any worse and the shares, at 6.3p, were too cheap because investors had given up on them. How wrong we were.
First came the news of a cyberattack, which knocked 4.4pc off the share price. Then a profits warning on Monday caused the shares to lose 36pc. They now stand at just 3.8p, a far cry from the 45.35p at which we added them to our IHT Portfolio in January 2019.
We wrote last month that the company had a new strategy that struck us as sensible, and that it all now came down to execution. Fulcrum acknowledged as much this week.
While the cyberattack delayed some invoicing and cut managers off from information for a period, the real damage is being done by cost inflation and what the company called “ongoing challenges with the legacy and closure of historic projects”, which this column imagines to be a reference to its smart meter business.