Late on Thursday night the final placing letters were received and Allenby wrapped up on a 3.75p £1.2 million placing for Chill Brands (CHLL) having missed its targets by a country mile. Within hours the press was reporting Government plans to ban disposable vapes, Chill’s product. The placing only actually settles on Wednesday 31st so should places be able to get it reversed and get their hard-earned back?
As first reported in the early hours of last Friday, the Government has outlined plans to ban disposable vapes and to crack down on the whole vaping sector. Chill Brands (CHLL) has responded. Natch it dissembles and omits. And the omission is material
For more than a week Chill Brands (CHLL) tried to raise between £3 and £4 million in a placing. On Thursday evening the final placing letters arrived with advisor and broker Allenby and the placing closed at £1.2 million. The placees were locked in, a disingenuous RNS was prepared, and folks went to bed. Within hours there was a bombshell report in the Daily Telegraph which other publications were able to verify as accurate. The company’s entire product range will soon be banned. Oddly there has been no RNS about this.
Chill Brands (CHLL) is this morning boasting of how it has managed to issue £2.4 million of new shares at 3.75p. As ever, this company is wholly disingenuous. It is almost as if it and its disgraced adviser Allenby, of NightCap (NGHT) infamy, gets a strange sort of sexual pleasure from misleading investors and has become addicted to it.
Lucian: As a vaper, I watched with interest the excellent 4-part Netflix documentary “The Big Vape” about the spectacular rise and fall of the leading brand JUUL. I thoroughly recommend it to vapers and non-vapers alike. It is a fascinating insight into the workings of Silicon Valley. Anyway, it got me thinking about Chill Brands (CHLL), whose only product right now seems to be a nicotine-free disposable vape called Chill Zero. Last week I listened to a recent interview with the CEO and was struck by how unrealistic the business proposition seemed to be.
There are two simple questions that Chill Brands (CHLL) will not answer but the scale of evasion suggests that the answers will be disastrous for shareholders. Let us start with the issue of repeat orders in UK retail for its nicotine free vapes. There is hard data on how many stores have received a first order.
I have never disputed the ability of Chill Brands (CHLL) to get its nicotine free vapes into stores. My pal Ray Ingelby is a magician in that regard. The issue, as ever, is reorder levels and while Chill says it has had some it continues to dissemble on how many. It is also strangely silent on how little cash it has left.
I am a bit of a Chill Brands (CHLL) groupie and have been ever since it was Zoetic (ZOE). That does not make me a fan. I published a massive bear dossier when the shares were 76p and, despite my colleagues, a friend and me facing active harassment from a paid thug, have been bearish ever since. The shares are now 3.45p. Yesterday afternoon something really weird happened.
I had to check that this announcement was not dated April 1. It is surely a spoof. In short, an ecommerce website with bugger all traffic generating bugger all sales belonging to Chill Brands (CHLL) is now going to stock a range of overpriced products made by Cellular Goods (CBX) for which there is not, and has ever been, any material demand. It really is totally pointless. The gross profits generated by either party will be less than the cost of publishing the RNS. So why tell us?
The ramping continues with news that Chill Brands (CHLL) is to plug its nicotine free vapes via a wholesaler website. With almost zero brand awareness it is hard to see many small independent stores placing orders via this channel but in the absence of any positive financials to ramp the shares ahead of the next bailout placing any news will do. But it is what it is NOT saying that matters.
It is a start for Chill Brands (CHLL) with its rollout of non-nicotine vapes. But so far the numbers really do not look very impressive. Not that those ramping the shares ahead of the next placing care about that.
