October 20, 2020
17:00
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Investors are looking forward to the results at Barco Wednesday morning. The big question is whether the imaging group, which is doing twice as bad as the Bel20 this year, was not punished too harshly.
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In 2019, there was absolute unanimity among the Investors’ editors about what the shares of the year should be about one name. Ship
had to and would in the list come. Surfing on the success of its Clickshare meeting tool, Barco beat the Bel20 with a cool 100 percentage points. It was since the 90s since investors embraced the imaging group so eagerly.
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Then came the coronavirus. Presentations became webinars and meetings became Zoom meetings. Clickshare went into lockdown and ended up economically unemployed in a dusty corner of the business economy. And that was not the only calamity that the corona virus brought down on Barco. Cinemas on all parts of the world have been transformed into a wasteland that even market leaders are talking about. The world’s second largest cinema group Cineworld, a Barco customer for display projectors, just like cinema giant AMC sees the financial bottom approaching.
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Suddenly, the stock market darling became a corona patient with little hope of an immediate cure. Barco has a loss of 48 percent since January with a stock market pit that is more than twice the size of the Bel20 (-17% since the beginning of the year).
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