The company is truly an extreme example of poor liquidity for a listed company.
Last Friday at the open:
10:03 share 1.68 (+7%)
10:05 share 1.51 (-4%)
Today the range was even wider. At the open, it rose +9.5%, and a couple of minutes later, it dipped to -5.5%. Hardly any trades were made; rather, this was most likely just the momentary spread of the share.
Interested by this, I tried to figure out how large the actual float of the share is, assuming we count all “sticky money” (tahmainen raha)—meaning, in addition to insiders, long-term anchor investors, larger institutions, partners, etc.
Instead of calculating it myself, I fed Gemini the insider transactions, key press releases, and the latest samples of the top 10 shareholders and debated for a while, correcting errors. Getting an exact figure is difficult because part of this rigid ownership is in nominee registers, and insider ownership is also held through separate holding/investment companies.
Overall, it could be said that at least a good third (over 36%) of the company is somewhat “cemented,” meaning likely not active on the market (even though there are no legal barriers to selling). Optimistically, sticky money could amount to as much as 60 million shares, or about half, if we make a rough order-of-magnitude estimate of long-term investors from previous offerings.
Whatever the “effective free float” is, it can generally be assumed to have decreased following the '25 subscription and the '26 direct investment, explaining the increased volatility to some extent.
Additionally, a significant portion of retail investors’ NextCell positions are surely at the bottom of portfolios, 70%–90% in the red, and there is no interest in realizing those losses. The company’s record 1-month volume, which has only been broken in terms of share count by the recent Hong Kong news and the 2025 Pro-Young results announcement + rights issue, was set in September 2020 at a price over 10 times higher than the current one. In terms of euro value, those recent volumes fall far behind.
Earnings release coming up on Thursday!