New PR Barely Pushes Baltia Air Lines Inc (OTCMKTS:BLTA) Up
After another month and a half of silence yesterday Baltia Air Lines Inc (OTCMKTS:BLTA) published a new PR. In it the company announced that its Initial Cadre Check Airmen (ICCA) have successfully completed the recurrent training in a simulator in preparation for Check Airmen certification to be conducted during proving flights. The fact that the company has passed another test is definitely encouraging but it is not what investors wanted to see.
Baltia entered Phase III of its FAA Air Carrier Certification back in October 2014 and initially things were going rather smoothly. Unfortunately, the company failed to pass the mini evacuation test and has been unable to do so for quite a while. Rumors about the successful passing of the evacuation test were flying around for months but with no official confirmation the hype quickly died down. As a result the performance of BLTA’s stock has been so atrocious that this Wednesday it dropped to a new 52-week low of $0.0033.
Yesterday’s PR did attract some attention and the daily volume of 35 million shares surpassed the one from the previous session by more than 3 times but the intensified trading did not translate into a more pronounced move in the right direction – the stock closed less than 3% in the green and even those gains were registered right before the closing bell. Compared to its price from the start of March the stock is down by nearly 80%.
The problem is that even if Baltia finally move forward with their certification that won’t make the red flags any less serious. The latest quarterly report revealed that at the end of March BLTA had:
• $118 thousand cash
• $131 thousand total current assets
• $2.9 million total current liabilities
• ZERO revenues
• $2.8 million net loss
Last year Baltia had to issue the mind-boggling amount of 2.2 BILLION shares which meant that as of December 31, 2014, the company had 5.5 BILLION outstanding shares. The issuance of shares hasn’t slowed down with the start of 2015 and as of May 4 the outstanding shares had reached 5.98 million shares. In order to accommodate the future issuance of shares BLTA had to amend their authorized amount increasing it to 6,986,000,000 common shares.
With the stock sitting at near-record low prices and myriad of extremely serious red flags any trades should be attempted only after extensive due diligence.
