Should You Buy SpaceandPeople Plc, Integrated Diagnostics Holdings PLC And African Potash Ltd After Today's Results?

Cautious optimism

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What's SpaceandPeople(LSE: SAL) all about then? It does promotional space at more than 750 shopping centres, city centres, retail parks and the like -- offering things like promotional kiosks and other marketing services. And it's just released full year results for 2015.

With the termination of one of the firm's agreements, UK operations fell back a little as expected, and gross revenue dropped from £31.6m in 2014 to £26.5m. But pre-tax profit before exceptionals stayed approximately the same at £1m, and with no non-recurring costs the company reported a basic EPS rise of 82% to 4.26p. The dividend was lifted 10% to 2.2p per share, to yield 3.5%, and there was net cash of £0.7m on the books.

The shares have been up and down a little all morning, and at the time of writing I'm seeing a 2.5% rise to 61.5p, so what are the prospects for the future? Well, there's a 54% rise in EPS forecast for the current year, with the dividend expected to grow to yield 4.3%. And that puts the shares on a forward P/E of just 10.

Chairman Charles G Hammond told us "We believe that SpaceandPeople is creating a solid platform for growth and a sustainable future", and though it's a very small company with a market cap of only £11.65m and comes with the commensurate risk, I'd be cautiously optimistic.

Egyptian healthcare bargain?

Integrated Diagnostics Holdings(LSE: IDHC) is an altogether bigger company, with a market cap of close to £500m, though that's a little down from its value at flotation in May 2015. Priced in US dollars, the shares dropped as low as $3.85 in February this year, but since then we've seen a 34% recovery to today's $5.15 -- with no change so far on the day full year results were released.

The Jersey-registered company bills itself as "Egypt's largest fully integrated private-sector provider of medical diagnostics services", and saw revenues grow 18% to 1,015 Egyptian Pounds (approximately £80m), with adjusted net profit up 18.4% and earnings per share up 9% -- and the firm declared a dividend of six US cents per share for a modest yield of 1.2%.

Should you buy? Well, the combination of an AIM listing, an overseas registration, and operating in Egypt will add risk for sure. But that's offset by forecasts of 47% EPS growth this year and 25% next, which would drop the P/E to 13 by the end of 2017 -- and dividends are predicted to yield 3.7% by then.

Potash potential

Potash is in the news of late with Sirius Minerals' York Potash project looking increasingly promising, and today we have interim results from African Potash(LSE: AFPO). It's another tiddler, with a market cap of £14m, and is registered in Guernsey this time. As I write, the shares are down 14% to just 1.45p, but that still represents a quadrupling over the past 12 months -- so how did the results go?

The company realised its first revenue from the fertilizer trade in December, of $59,000, and has a trading agreement in place with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. But there's obviously some way to go yet before they see any profit, with a pre-tax loss of $716,000 reported, together with a cash balance as of 31 December of $509,000.

I think it's fairly obvious that means a fair bit more cash (and the corresponding dilution) will be needed in the coming few years to fund the company's development -- and in January this year we've already seen a $1.18m share placing. There's potential here, but it's too risky for me.

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Alan Oscroft has no position in any shares mentioned. The Motley Fool UK has no position in any of the shares mentioned. We Fools don't all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors.