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Following THIS PIECE at the weekend we have had a communication from Mr Richard Bennett, the independent NED at ShareProphets AIM-China Filthy Forty member China New Energy (CNEL). To remind readers, we were wondering who or what was Sunbird Bioenergy Africa Limited - the outfit with which China New announced a MOU had been signed last week regarding projects in Zimbabwe and Zambia.
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Comments
Simple Moving Avarice
Reading through the same trail as you it doesn’t see that complicated.
CNEL build bio-refineries and provide the equipment, project management and training. But they don’t do the civil engineering. In the recent MOUs it is Obax who do that.
Building bio-refineries means you get one-off contracts and the income stream is not smooth so they are trying to expand from being an EPC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction) company to an operating company with varying success. It sounds as if the drop off in their profits coincided with the fall in oil price (which makes bio refineries less attractive) and without an operating arm their income stream goes off a cliff.
Sunbird are focussed on building and operating bio refineries in Africa. One suspects that Africa is one of the few places where bio-refineries could be profitable at present. Now whether Sunbird exists as a way to drum up business for CNEL (and maybe hope to be taken over by CNEL later) or whether they have their own separate goals is open to question. Clearly they don’t have two brass farthings to rub together so if any of their various ideas ever get a green light they are going to have to magic up a lot of money from somewhere. Obax look to be one possibility but I am not sure what would be in it for them, except that Obax are probably very motivated to stimulate big civil engineering projects in Nigeria and maybe other countries in Africa.