Baltia Air Lines Inc (OTCMKTS:BLTA)’s Bounce Continues
Last Wednesday the stock of Baltia Air Lines Inc (OTCMKTS:BLTA) sunk down to a new 52-week low of $0.0051. After hitting such record lows the stock finally managed to bounce and on the very next day it registered a gain of over 42% as it closed at $0.0077. On Friday the ticker finished the trading day 10.3% in the green at $0.0085 but its performance wasn’t that convincing. In fact, for nearly the entire session BLTA were trading in the red and only managed to surge upwards during the last hour.
The recent performance of the stock has been nothing short of depressing as BLTA moved down from around $0.018 commanded at the start of March. Even after the last two sessions of gains the stock is still sitting close to 60% lower as investors have had almost no reasons to get excited about BLTA.
The latest quarterly was filed on May 14 and it covers the first three months of the year. It showed that at the end of March Baltia had:
• $118 thousand cash
• $131 thousand total current assets
• $2.9 million total current liabilities
• ZERO revenues
• $2.8 million net loss
The company finished the quarter with a massive working capital deficit while the accumulated deficit during the development phase has now surpassed $113 million. The lackluster financials, however, are far from the only red flag that investors must take into account. They will also need to take a look at the bloated outstanding shares and the continued dilution of the common stock.
At the end of 2013 BLTA had around 3.3 BILLION outstanding shares, an amount that some might already consider alarming, but just 12 months later there were 5.5 million outstanding shares. Since the start of 2015 the issuance of shares hasn’t slowed down a whole lot and as of March 31 BLTA had 5.86 BILLION outstanding shares. A little over a month later, as of May 4, there were 5.98 billion shares.The rampant issuance caused the company to quickly deplete its authorized amount and as a result BLTA changed its Articles of Incorporation in order to increase its authorized shares by 1 billion to a total of 6,986,000,000 common shares.
On May 13, after three months of silence, BLTA finally published a new PR but it failed to have any positive effect on the performance of the ticker. The company announced that its cabin crewmembers have successfully completed the recurrent training but understandably investors were far from excited when BLTA has been unable to pass the mini evacuation test of the FAA Carrier Certification process for months.
With its limited financial resources Baltia may be forced to continue selling more and more shares for funds and if this is the case the recently increased authorized shares might not be enough. At least the company’s insiders seem to have confidence – on May 18 3,7 million of the total daily volume of 5.9 million traded shares were acquired by the VP of Finance. Will this be enough to keep the stock going in the right direction though?
