SMALL CAP MOVERS: Baron Oil surges 70% in a week

Baron Oil has increased its shareholding in SundaGas from 33.33 per cent to 85 per cent, and thereby increased its indirect interest in the Chuditch discovery off the coast of Timor-Leste from 25 per cent to 63.75 per cent.

The news made the shares of the company, which appropriately enough has a ticker symbol of BOIL, this week’s hottest items, with a gain of 70 per cent.

Everything is in place to allow SundaGas to undertake the production sharing contract technical work programme activities, especially the critical 3D seismic reprocessing, Baron Oil said.

Sector peer Pantheon Resources had a tougher week, losing around a third of its value after it started flow testing at the Talitha #A well on Alaska’s North Slope after delays caused by blizzards.

‘Weather conditions have since improved meaning operations have resumed and testing has now commenced on the Kupurak horizon, with the Talitha #A well currently flaring natural gas as it cleans up,’ it said in a statement.

‘Whilst this is an encouraging sign, the company cautions that it is too early to make a definitive assessment as to the ultimate commerciality of the Kupurak horizon. Results will be announced at the conclusion of testing operations,’ it added.

Investors dialled into Pelatro after it secured contracts worth $500,000 for 2021, taking the total new business for the year to $6.5million in revenues.

The company, which develops and supplies customer engagement software, said it was ‘confident’ of meeting financial expectations for the current year.

The shares were up 43 per cent on the week.

Elsewhere in the technology sector, MobilityOne slumped 15 per cent after it backed out of the proposed acquisition of Tanjung Pinang Resources.

The e-commerce infrastructure payment solutions and platform provider said the acquisition was binned by mutual agreement after MobilityOne’s recent purchase of OneTransfer Remittance, another Malaysian company.

One acquisition that is going ahead is the purchase of Insight, a data science and machine learning solutions company, by Catena Group.

The investment company already had a 9 per cent stake in Insight but is now going all-in, as they say in poker circles. With the acquisition will come a change of name to Insig AI.

Catena is issuing 45.3million shares valued at 59p each to the owners of Insight and up to £1.5million in cash.

Despite the company proposing to raise around £6.1million by placing shares at 67p a pop, the shares were up 38 per cent at 81.5p after trading in the shares resumed on AIM.

System1 Group, the self-styled advertising effectiveness agency, cheered the market with a year-end trading update.

With the resumption of sales growth and a strong net cash position, the board said it will look to reinstate the share buyback programme that was suspended in 2020 due to uncertainty over the potential impact of the pandemic on its business. A return to dividend payments is not currently envisaged, the company added.

Warpaint London shares jumped on Tuesday after it revealed strong trading seen in the second half of 2020 had continued into the first quarter of 2021.

Sales for the period were ahead of last year when coronavirus lockdowns hit the last few days of the reporting period.

The cosmetics company said it has also boosted online sales in the UK and US through Amazon and is now eyeing an expansion in the EU ‘in the near future’.

The shares ended the week 16 per cent higher at 125.5p.