SMALL CAP MOVERS: Harland & Wolff jumps after Royal Navy contract win

UK shipbuilding may be a sunset industry, but there is one company trying to spark a resurgence.

Harland & Wolff rose 180 percent to 25p this week after landing a big contract.

The Belfast-based shipyard and offshore construction company is known for building the Titanic.

It has now been selected as the preferred bidder for a £1.6bn contract to build three ships to supply munitions, supplies and provisions to the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates.

The Belfast shipyard will build all three 216-metre ships, which when completed will be the second longest British military ships behind the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers.

Harland & Wolff has won Department of Defense contracts in the past, but not on a scale of this magnitude.

The dockyard’s iconic yellow cranes, taken into administration in 2019 but afloat again, are known to locals as Samson & Goliath, a symbol of Belfast’s once mighty shipbuilding industry.

This latest contract win ‘will be a major boost to the UK shipbuilding industry… creating around 2,000 jobs in the UK and showcasing leading British design’, said Defense Secretary Ben Wallace.

Production will start in 2025 and all three support ships are expected to be operational by 2032.

As part of the proposal, a group called Team Resolute pledged a £75 million investment in infrastructure to support the UK’s shipbuilding industry.

Poolbeg Pharma was another Irish-based company on the rise, climbing 27 percent to 10.5 pence. A consortium of which it is part won a €2.3 million government grant from the Irish government to develop an oral vaccine platform.

The consortium plans to develop at least one anti-infective oral vaccine candidate into a Phase 1 trial over three years.

Elsewhere, it was good news for cows, as BSF Enterprise announced that wholly owned subsidiary 3D Bio-Tissues had successfully produced three lab-grown meat prototypes, boosting its shares by 42 percent to 11.3 pence.

The investment company said in a statement that three small fillets of meat, about 30mm high and 15mm in diameter (smaller than a 5p piece), weighing five grams, were produced by the subsidiary.

All in all, it was a decent week for the London junior markets, with AIM100 up 0.39 percent to 4,034, although it again lagged Footsie, which was up more than 0.8 percent.

Was among the fallers Firing strategic mineralslost 17 percent to 13.2 pence after a first batch of test results from its drilling program at its Atex lithium tantalum project in Ivory Coast.

Firering liked the results and most likely there was an element of profit taking as the shares have doubled over the past month.

A second phase of research with Ricca Resources is being prepared, it said, following a recent $18.6 million investment deal.

Parsley Box, supplier of ready meals, decided to delist after only a year and a half on AIM

Eco (Atlantic Ocean) was less confident and fell in value by half to 19.3p when the Gazania-1 well off the coast of South Africa was found to have run dry.

More work will be done to analyze the data, the oil company said.

Finally, another company from the 2021 IPO rush has come to an inglorious end Parsley Box decide to delist from AIM after only a year and a half.

Shares, which were brought to 200p in March 2021 for an initial market cap of £83m, subsequently lost more than 99 per cent of their value.

The ready meal provider is hosting a shareholder meeting to approve its delisting after it failed to raise funding.

Parsley Box’s cancellation comes shortly after fellow class of 21 member Made.com collapsed into administration earlier this month, while other alumni like In The Style, Revolution Beauty, and Seraphine have seen their values ​​plummet.

“One more day and another recent IPO goes up in smoke,” said Russ Mold, director of investment at AJ Bell.