Ampliphi Biosciences Corp. (OTCMKTS:APHB) Reverses Its Downwards Trend
The stock of Ampliphi Biosciences Corp. (OTCMKTS:APHB) rarely finds its place among the top traded pennystocks. Although it operates in the always popular medical and biotechnology industry APHB doesn’t attract the attention of the market. At the end of last week though, they made a significant jump up the chart after nearly 700 thousand shares changed hands throughout the day resulting in a gain of 20% and a close at $0.69. APHB also reached their new 52-week high of $0.74.
Back in 2011 the company decided to leave behind its gene therapy development and instead focus on bacteriophage-based therapeutics. In order to achieve this they acquired the UK-based Biocontrol Ltd for 22 million of their shares, changed their name and ticker and never looked back.
Compared to most other medical pennystocks APHB is really reluctant to issue press releases about their current operations. The earliest PR from them is dated February, 2013 and for the whole year they made a total of 10 announcements. More importantly the company was dedicated to not filing a single financial statement. In our previous article covering APHB we had to use their financial results from 2009.
This time around we have some more current information thanks to the Form 10-12G APHB filed on December 16. In it they reveal the following financials for the nine months ending September 2013:
- $4.8 million cash
- $5.3 million total current assets
- $1.8 million total liabilities
- $300 thousand revenues
- $9.6 million net loss
Obviously the company is still relying on debt and equity issuance to finance its operations. In July they did a private placement of convertible preferred stock for $7 million while also converting around $6.3 million of their outstanding convertible notes. As a whole APHB issued around 10 million of their Series B Convertible Preferred stock, each of which can turn into 10 common shares. In addition warrants for another 25 million common shares were issued with an exercise price of just $0.14, significantly lower than the current market price.
It seems that those funds were nearly not enough and on December 16 APHB entered into another private placement of stock where they agreed to issue approximately 72 million shares for a total of $18 million. On a fully diluted basis the company has burned through nearly 75% of the 445 million common shares authorized.
It is apparent that the company is trying to progress with its business plan but the amount of dilution has reached alarming levels. Not to mention that the accumulated deficit since inception in 1992 now amounts to $330 million. And at the current price of nearly 70 cents per share APHB has a lot of room for corrections. During today’s session we will see if the recent interview with President Barack Obama will have a positive effect on the performance of the numerous pennystocks in the marijuana industry. The hype that pushed them sky-high has been losing strength throughout last week. On Friday Growlife, Inc. (OTCBB:PHOT) lost another 10% and dropped to $0.20 while GreenGro Technologies, Inc. (OTCMKTS:GRNH) fell by 8% to a close of $0.37.
