The Chairman of Silverlake Axis (SLA), Mr. Goh highlighted in his comments in recent AGM that Accounting and Market are yet unable to quantify or measure the hidden values of a coy like SLA. This was in response to a query by a shareholder why SLA’s NAV n Earnings per share seem to stand still in the last 5 years. SLA market price has not moved much in spite of its creditable performance.
Somehow the hidden values of SLA have not been uncovered.
One may wonder what are SLA Hidden Values?
After listening to him through several AGMs, it appears SLA’s hidden values are tied up with his mathematical theories he had discovered in Category Theories, Permutation, Orchestration in designing his original SLA Core Banking Software. These are indeed very complex to understand.
Mr. Goh had took pains to explain his Category Theories in AGMs. But not many fund managers seem to grasp the significance of his findings. SLA price was instead, very much slammed down by allegations of IPT (Interested Party Transactions).
But we see the end results of SLA’s business growth over the years are quite clear. SLA has become the leading Core Banking software vendor in the Asia Pacific. SLA has not lost a single customer to date. Mr. Goh had built up SLA with one dollar and against incumbent banking software giants like IBM, with immense resources at their disposal.
It seems SLA’s high-performance Core Banking software suite is largely driven by Mr. Goh’s mathematical discoveries in Category Theory. It’s also scalable in recent years to Core-Core Banking and Digital Banking Solutions.
To retail investors like us, we have more difficulties than professional fund managers to understand Mr. Goh’s hidden values claim.
But we note that the Chairman put in his money where his mouth is. Mr.Goh remains by far, the largest shareholder of SLA. He has also distinguished names in the banking industry sitting in the SLA BOD.
The complex hidden values of SLA reminds me of ARM chip software. About 15 years ago, the PC chip was dominated by the likes of Intel. ARM was a struggling chip design start-up, very much ignored by analysts and the market. There was very little attention paid to its efficient chip design, which in later years, prove to be the standard for portable devices. ARM’s hidden values were uncovered by the advent of smart handphones and devices. Softbank of Japan then bought over ARM at a very high valuation and extended further ARM’s capabilities to this day.
Will the current Fintech craze among banks, the Core Banking extendability seems to be much neglected. Will the banks eventually turn their attention to Digital banking as the right solution to scale their business?
I am sure Mr. Goh places his hope that SLA’s hidden values will be uncovered as the market trends unfold. He is sure Core banking can never be replaced by fintech.
Vested and hope for the best.
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