Last Orders: What you might have missed today on the ASX

That’s it for the day’s trading on the ASX. Hope you had a better time of it than Quibi’s investors.

The “TV in your pocket” startup thought there was a market to push 10 minute-or-less videos to a mobile audience for between $US5 and $US8 a month.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of DreamWorks, and Meg Whitman, former CEO HP headed the team. Content quality? Hollywood-high, apparently.

And it would want to be, because Katzenberg told Vulture that Quibi creators were getting “$US100,000” per minute of content.

But Vulture might have spotted an issue back in July:

These two paragraphs about Quibi’s founder and CEO are devastating and revealing…

When Quibi CEO Meg Whitman was asked what shows she watches, she said: “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg has an assistant print out his emails pic.twitter.com/avYiSFUtTu

— Hamza Shaban (@hshaban) October 21, 2020

And there was the unfortunate issue of peeps not needing mobile content for the past six months, because they were locked in their homes with, uh, TVs.

Today, six months after launch and some $US2 billion later, Quibi was given a final good meal and a bullet in the back of its head. That’s about, ooh, $15 million… a day. For six months.

Here’s some news you might have missed from ASX stocks that would do quite useful things, thank you, with just a day’s Quibi funding.

Announcements

– Vortiv (ASX:VOR) has proposed selling its cybersecurity businesses Cloudten Industries and Decipher Works to CyberCX for $25 million, and is promising to use about $20 million of that to buy back its shares. Vortiv said it acquired the two businesses over the last three years and is selling them for a 196 per cent return. It will be left with its quarter-stake in TSI India, which owns and manages ATMs in India and offers bill payment services in that country, but is also looking at acquisition opportunities in the Australian technology sector.

– Liontown Resources (ASX:LTR) says a downstream scoping study of its Kathleen Valley Project in WA shows that adding an on-site facility to process battery-grade products would generate excellent economic returns. The project could make the company a significant supplier of refined battery feedstock, Liontown says.

– Online screening and verification company CV Check (ASX:CV1) has added UK-based Vero Screening as an international wholesale customer. Vero will be able to turn to CV Check to screen people seeking employment with their clients after having studied, lived or worked in Australia or New Zealand.

– Mesoblast (ASX:MSB) says it has begun a study testing how its anti-inflammatory stem cell treatment remestemcel-L works to treat refractory Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Up to 48 patients with those conditions at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio will have remestemcel-L or placebo delivered by endoscope directly to areas of inflammation and tissue injury.

– Micro-X (ASX:MX1) says it net cash outflows of $2.5 million in the quarter, leaving it with a closing cash balance of $15.5 million. The company says it will be “carefully balancing its cash runway” while maintaining production of its Rover mobile X-ray device. The company expects to receive $1.4 million from its first Rover sale this quarter, to a number of Pacific Island nations.

– ResApp Health (ASX:RAP) says that AstraZeneca Japan will use its cough-counting smartphone app to measure the frequency of patient coughs over extended periods. The technology can distinguish between coughs and background noise, ResApp said.