Here's Why We're Not Too Worried About Freeman Gold's (CVE:FMAN) Cash Burn Situation

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Even when a business is losing money, it's possible for shareholders to make money if they buy a good business at the right price. For example, biotech and mining exploration companies often lose money for years before finding success with a new treatment or mineral discovery. But while history lauds those rare successes, those that fail are often forgotten; who remembers Pets.com?
So should Freeman Gold (CVE:FMAN) shareholders 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. First, we'll determine its cash runway by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves.
We've discovered 4 warning signs about Freeman Gold. View them for free.
A company's cash runway is calculated by dividing its cash hoard by its cash burn. In February 2025, Freeman Gold had CA$4.1m in cash, and was debt-free. Importantly, its cash burn was CA$1.7m over the trailing twelve months. That means it had a cash runway of about 2.4 years as of February 2025. Arguably, that's a prudent and sensible length of runway to have. Depicted below, you can see how its cash holdings have changed over time.
View our latest analysis for Freeman Gold
Freeman Gold didn't record any revenue over the last year, indicating that it's an early stage company still developing its business. So while we can't look to sales to understand growth, we can look at how the cash burn is changing to understand how expenditure is trending over time. While it hardly paints a picture of imminent growth, the fact that it has reduced its cash burn by 23% over the last year suggests some degree of prudence. Admittedly, we're a bit cautious of Freeman Gold due to its lack of significant operating revenues. So we'd generally prefer stocks from this list of stocks that have analysts forecasting growth.
While Freeman Gold 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. Companies can raise capital through either debt or equity. One of the main advantages held by publicly listed companies is that they can sell shares to investors to raise cash and fund growth. By looking at a company's cash burn relative to its market capitalisation, we gain insight on how much shareholders would be diluted if the company needed to raise enough cash to cover another year's cash burn.
Freeman Gold's cash burn of CA$1.7m is about 6.1% of its CA$28m 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.
As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about Freeman Gold's cash burn. For example, we think its cash runway suggests that the company is on a good path. And even though its cash burn reduction wasn't quite as impressive, it was still a positive. Looking at all the measures in this article, together, we're not worried about its rate of cash burn, which seems to be under control. On another note, we conducted an in-depth investigation of the company, and identified 4 warning signs for Freeman Gold (2 don't sit too well with us!) that you should be aware of before investing here.
If you would prefer to check out another company with better fundamentals, then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt or this list of stocks which are all forecast to grow.
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