There’s nothing like a deadline to sharpen the mind: xTV Networks’s long awaited backdoor listing will — all going well — close two days before it’s due to be kicked off the ASX.

New Zealand Coastal Seafoods is using the shell company to get onto the ASX and the relisting date is June 14.

xTV Networks was suspended from the ASX on June 16, 2016.

The ASX allows a three-year window for broken companies to find a new lease on life before giving them the boot.

“What happened was the company’s US subsidiary, which was a US operating TV company, was subject to a bankruptcy action,” chairman Winton Willesee told Stockhead in 2017.

“That’s in the process of going through now, but the parent company in Australia doesn’t have sufficient business to trade on the ASX.”

Willesee said today he’s confident of getting a three-month extension from the ASX in the event of any delays.

He told Stockhead they’d looked at “dozens” of opportunities before hooking the ling fish seller.

New Zealand Coastal Seafoods is based out of Christchurch and its main product is dried ling maw. Ling is a large, white fleshed fish and the maw is its swim bladder, which is sold to Asian customers.

It’s raising up to to $6m with shares priced at 2.5c, for a market cap of just over $14m. There will be over 706m shares on issue once the deal is done.

Rich food, cash poor

New Zealand Coastal Seafoods’ audited accounts say it had $NZ6,824 in the bank at the end of December 2018.

The company works on a March-to-March full year, and said for the nine months to December 31 — the latest accounts provided — revenue hit $NZ1.5m.

Last year’s full year accounts say it made a $NZ35,719 profit for the 12 months to March 2018.

But fish sales must have boomed in the remainder of the year: profits by December hit $NZ113,440.

xTV comes with a history

xTV on the other hand comes with $3.1m in liabilities.

The company went into voluntary administration in July last year and administrators Wayne Rushton and Martin Jones of Ferrier Hodgson closed a deed of company arrangement (DOCA) — a settlement between the company and its creditors — in February this year.

Creditors forgave $1.6m in debt, which allowed xTV to book an on-paper profit in December of $1.2m.

xTV started out as a uranium and base metals miner called Uramet Minerals in 2007. In 2011 it changed its name to Intercept to better reflect the fact it was now looking for gold in Guyana, South America.

By 2014 the gold project hadn’t panned out, it still owned a uranium project, and was trying to get Rio Tinto interested in a Tiwi Islands bauxite play.

It was time to bail out of minerals and into the development and distribution of cloud television tech.

Newly dubbed xTV Networks maxed out its listing subscriptions, raising $6m from excited investors keen to try their luck on a “Next Generation Media Company” from Silicon Valley.

It promised to deliver an internet platform that allowed companies to create and control their own video, social media and television channel.

Despite a series of announcements around new customers, the company wasn’t making money.

The final blow came when it thought it had a deal with telco AT&T. xTV announced it to the ASX and were promptly told by AT&T to retract it, before the US giant scrapped the whole deal.

A $10m ‘hail Mary’ loan from US Institutional investor Bergen Global Opportunity Fund wasn’t enough to stop a suspension in June, and bankruptcy proceedings starting in September.

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