We Think Tungsten Mining (ASX:TGN) Can Easily Afford To Drive Business Growth

There's no doubt that money can be made by owning shares of unprofitable businesses. For example, although Amazon.com made losses for many years after listing, if you had bought and held the shares since 1999, you would have made a fortune. Nonetheless, only a fool would ignore the risk that a loss making company burns through its cash too quickly.

Given this risk, we thought we'd take a look at whether Tungsten Mining (ASX:TGN) shareholders should be worried about its cash burn. In this report, we will consider the company's annual negative free cash flow, henceforth referring to it as the 'cash burn'. First, we'll determine its cash runway by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves.

View our latest analysis for Tungsten Mining

Does Tungsten Mining Have A Long Cash Runway?

A company's cash runway is the amount of time it would take to burn through its cash reserves at its current cash burn rate. When Tungsten Mining last reported its balance sheet in June 2021, it had zero debt and cash worth AU$19m. In the last year, its cash burn was AU$4.2m. That means it had a cash runway of about 4.6 years as of June 2021. A runway of this length affords the company the time and space it needs to develop the business. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.

How Is Tungsten Mining's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Although Tungsten Mining reported revenue of AU$143k last year, it didn't actually have any revenue from operations. To us, that makes it a pre-revenue company, so we'll look to its cash burn trajectory as an assessment of its cash burn situation. Notably, its cash burn was actually down by 64% in the last year, which is a real positive in terms of resilience, but uninspiring when it comes to investment for growth. Tungsten Mining makes us a little nervous due to its lack of substantial operating revenue. We prefer most of the stocks on this list of stocks that analysts expect to grow.

Can Tungsten Mining Raise More Cash Easily?

While we're comforted by the recent reduction evident from our analysis of Tungsten Mining's cash burn, it is still worth considering how easily the company could raise more funds, if it wanted to accelerate spending to drive growth. Generally speaking, a listed business can raise new cash through issuing shares or taking on debt. Commonly, a business will sell new shares in itself to raise cash and drive growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.

Tungsten Mining has a market capitalisation of AU$102m and burnt through AU$4.2m last year, which is 4.1% of the company's market value. That's a low proportion, so we figure the company would be able to raise more cash to fund growth, with a little dilution, or even to simply borrow some money.

How Risky Is Tungsten Mining's Cash Burn Situation?

As you can probably tell by now, we're not too worried about Tungsten Mining's cash burn. In particular, we think its cash runway stands out as evidence that the company is well on top of its spending. And even its cash burn reduction was very encouraging. After considering a range of factors in this article, we're pretty relaxed about its cash burn, since the company seems to be in a good position to continue to fund its growth. On another note, we conducted an in-depth investigation of the company, and identified 5 warning signs for Tungsten Mining (2 are a bit concerning!) that you should be aware of before investing here.

If you would prefer to check out another company with better fundamentals, then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt or this list of stocks which are all forecast to grow.

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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.