Companies Like Apollo Silver (CVE:APGO) Can Afford To Invest In Growth

Yahoo

15-03-2025

We can readily understand why investors are attracted to unprofitable companies. By way of example, Apollo Silver (CVE:APGO) has seen its share price rise 103% over the last year, delighting many shareholders. But while history lauds those rare successes, those that fail are often forgotten; who remembers Pets.com?
Given its strong share price performance, we think it's worthwhile for Apollo Silver shareholders to consider whether its cash burn is concerning. In this report, we will consider the company's annual negative free cash flow, henceforth referring to it as the 'cash burn'. Let's start with an examination of the business' cash, relative to its cash burn.
Check out our latest analysis for Apollo Silver
You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. In November 2024, Apollo Silver had CA$14m in cash, and was debt-free. In the last year, its cash burn was CA$2.9m. Therefore, from November 2024 it had 4.8 years of cash runway. A runway of this length affords the company the time and space it needs to develop the business. You can see how its cash balance has changed over time in the image below.
Apollo Silver 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. Even though it doesn't get us excited, the 49% reduction in cash burn year on year does suggest the company can continue operating for quite some time. Apollo Silver makes us a little nervous due to its lack of substantial operating revenue. We prefer most of the stocks on this list of stocks that analysts expect to grow.
While Apollo Silver 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. Commonly, a business will sell new shares in itself to raise cash and drive growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.
Since it has a market capitalisation of CA$69m, Apollo Silver's CA$2.9m in cash burn equates to about 4.2% of its market value. That's a low proportion, so we figure the company would be able to raise more cash to fund growth, with a little dilution, or even to simply borrow some money.
As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about Apollo Silver's cash burn. In particular, we think its cash runway stands out as evidence that the company is well on top of its spending. But it's fair to say that its cash burn reduction was also very reassuring. After considering a range of factors in this article, we're pretty relaxed about its cash burn, since the company seems to be in a good position to continue to fund its growth. Taking a deeper dive, we've spotted 4 warning signs for Apollo Silver you should be aware of, and 3 of them are concerning.
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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