Research lies at the heart of our business. Our team of eleven seasoned research professionals focus their efforts on a number of key sectors, including Metals & Mining, Oil and Gas, Technology, Support Services, Industrials, Media, Retail, Leisure and Healthcare.

Seymour Pierce is behind some market leading investment publications which include the Equity Market Monthly, AiM High, the Staffing Monthly, the Weekly Shop, Tech Notes and the Daily Bore. Whilst our key strength lies in our expert knowledge of our extensive portfolio of corporate clients, our senior analysts all cover mid- and large-cap stocks in order to provide a comprehensive view of the UK market.

Seymour Pierce’s research team currently restricts its coverage to UK listed stocks (AiM and Full List), but this includes many companies based overseas, particularly in India and China. We maintain the Seymour Pierce AiM India index and AiM China index in order to monitor the performance of these two key developing constituents of the UK investment landscape.

Leisure
Seymour Pierce aims to provides high value-added, ideas driven research on the UK Leisure sector for our institutional clients. We analyse smaller and larger cap companies quoted on both the junior and senior markets. Subsectors followed include hotels, pubs, cinemas, recreational facilities (eg bowling), restaurants, hobbies, holidays and football. We also closely follow Leisure subsectors that may not be represented by a quoted company at the present time. For example (as at Nov 2008) there are no quoted Health & Fitness companies. We provide research on both a sector and company-specific basis. Our aim to provide value-added product means that we are not afraid to take a contrarian view.

We also aim to provide an excellent service to our corporate clients of which there are several in UK Leisure, most notably in the football clubs subsector.

Life Sciences
Seymour Pierce primarily covers AIM listed small-to-mid cap companies in the spaces of drug discovery, product and services, and medical devices. It is our belief that these companies are often undervalued due to the lack of understanding from the market. We hope to bridge this gap by providing objective, accurate, and meaningful information. Companies currently being covered include Fulcrum Pharma, Tepnel Life Sciences, Cobra Biomanufacturing, Sareum Holding, Amphion Innovations, and NextGen. Meanwhile we also follow a number of larger-sized life science companies if we believe they offer good values. Protherics is one of these comanies that we have picked.

In addition to covering individual companies, we also aim to help the market understand general and particular trends in the healthcare universe. From time to time we publish sector reviews and/or notes on specific topics. For example, one such note currently in progress involves analysing all AIM-listed software companies in medical applications.

Metals & Mining
Seymour Pierce is a very active player in the small cap metals and mining sector in London.We currently have ten AIM-listed corporate clients in the mining sector, with market capitalisations ranging from around £6m to over £300m. Our client companies include both production and exploration firms spread across the gold, base, speciality metals and coal sectors.

Our corporate business is built around our strong reputation for research, marketing and fundraising. We believe that it is important to develop the market’s understanding of our corporate clients, which we achieved through regular, widely distributed, research updates. In all, we write mining research on about 30 companies, although many more are on our watch list, including companies listed overseas. We were ranked 7th for Metals and Mining in the Extel Smaller Companies 2006 survey.

Oil & Gas
One of Seymour Pierce's strengths is in the Oil and Gas sector and is as corporate broker and NOMAD to a number of AiM quoted oil and gas companies. As a small cap specialist our oil and gas research coverage particularly concentrates on Aim quoted companies that we feel may have the potential to expand into broad, balanced Exploration and Production companies or companies that can exploit the particular niche or experience of its management team. We have had a history of supporting oil and gas companies from an early stage, often bringing them to market and our research coverage aims to assist investor awareness of the client and its management team as the company develops.

Our current full research coverage includes Burren Energy, Egdon Resources, Europa Oil and Gas and Gulfsands Petroleum and is in a phase of expansion at present. We are particularly interested in promoting companies that we feel have a balanced approach to the relatively high-risk E&P sector through having existing cash-flow from production operations and being prepared to farm-out equity interests in exploration acreage to industry partners to reduce risks to investors.

Retail
Seymour Pierce maintains extensive coverage of the UK retail sector, focusing on both our small to mid cap corporate clients and large cap companies. Our portfolio of AIM listed corporate retail clients includes Liberty Plc, Jacques Vert Plc and The Stanley Gibbons Group. The team covers around 40 companies in the UK Retail sector. Detailed analysis extends from stock specific research and company valuation through to in depth sector reports.

Support Services
Seymour Pierce maintains a broad, detailed coverage of around 38 companies in the UK Support Services sector. We focus our attention more on the small and mid-cap end of the sector, whilst still maintaining coverage of the larger stocks. We have coverage of, and make markets in, all UK staffing companies down to £100m market cap plus a few below £100m.

Technology, Media & Telecoms 
Seymour Pierce has been very active in the Tech space on AiM, as broker to Computer Software Group, Maxima, Sopheon, Vialogy and Patsystems, among others. The team has successfully floated an eclectic mix of businesses across the technology spectrum, and helped raise secondary financing for companies in the aftermarket. In addition to this, the regular Tech Notes report provides a platform for top down industry analysis, valuation and performance data, as well as the exploration of current themes affecting the global Technology industry. Underlying this is a thorough understanding of each company’s positioning, which is updated in regular stock-specific, detailed analytical reports.