Baltia Air Lines Inc (OTCMKTS:BLTA) Loses Altitude
Running an airline company is anything but easy in this day and age. Running a publicly traded OTC-listed airline company is an even taller order because you have the added responsibility of raising the value of your shareholders and keeping them happy. So, how’s Baltia Air Lines Inc (OTCMKTS:BLTA) doing on that front?
If the press releases are to be believed, things seem to be moving along smoothly. BLTA recently announced that their Boeing 747 has undergone inspection and has met the Federal Aviation Administration aircraft conformity requirements. They also said that they have contracted the companies that will do the ground handling and maintenance work and that their personnel have demonstrated their competences in front of representatives from the FAA.
So, the press releases suggest that everything appears to be going according to plan. Take a look at the SEC filings, however, and you’ll notice one or two issues. Here, for example, are the figures recorded on September 30:
- current assets: $29 thousand in cash
- current liabilities: $2.7 million
- NO revenue since inception
- quarterly net loss: $5.4 million
- accumulated deficit: $106.6 million
Clearly, BLTA was in a bit of a financial mess at the end of the third quarter and nobody can say for sure whether or not it has managed to sort out the issues since then.
So, on the one hand, you’ve got the optimistic announcements which suggest that everything should be alright, but on the other, you have the financial reports which show that BLTA is a cash-strapped company that has not generated even a dime in revenues since its inception in 1989 (yes, that’s twenty-five years ago).
This is what you can base your investment decision on and it’s pretty clear from the chart at the beginning of the article that many people are unsure about what they should do. The aforementioned press releases did manage to push the ticker above the $0.02 per share mark, but last week, it registered three consecutive red sessions which means that it’s currently sitting at $0.018.
The performance is hardly confidence-inspiring, but some people might think that the current dip is actually a good entry point. If you are one of them, you mustn’t forget one thing – even if BLTA manage to get their jumbo jet off the ground, keeping it above our heads will require quite a lot of money.
If you read through the latest 10-Q closely, you’ll see that raising cash hasn’t really been that much of a problem for the company. In fact, during the first nine months of 2014, BLTA managed to raise a total of $7,117,038 which is more than can be said about many other OTC enterprises. The problem is, they did it by issuing a total of 1,450,613,042 shares of common stock.
In other words, 27% of BLTA‘s total O/S count was sold at just $0.005 per share. That’s quite a bargain, you would agree.
