With the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) moving higher today, up 1.59% at the time of writing, it draws interest to the shares bucking the trend.
These 3 mid-cap shares have had a rough month and are hitting 1-month lows today.
Which mid-cap shares are hitting 1-month lows today?
Altium Limited (ASX: ALU)
This $4.33 billion mid-cap share is down 4.05% to $31.74 today, hitting a 1-month low.
Altium provides popular printed circuit board (PCB) design software products, including Altium Design and Altium 365. Altium's collection of software solutions are used by many large, recognisable companies in America and Australia.
During last year's COVID-19 crash, Altium fell from its 52-week share price high of $42.76 to its 52-week low of $23.11, in 35 days. Consequently, Altium released business updates over the following months providing commentary on the impacts.
The company started to see signs of existing and potential customers in financial distress, leading to their own preservation of cash. This increased the difficulty for Altium to sign new deals and upsell customers. Altium responded to the market softening by offering discounted software subscriptions to retain and grow customers.
Since then, Altium announced the divestment of its embedded software development tool 'TASKING'. The decision is to facilitate future investment in the company's cloud platform, Altium 365. Altium will disclose the full impact of the divestment in its half-year results on 15 February.
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
This $2.95 billion mid-cap share has dropped 1.33% to $23.78 today, hitting a 1-month low.
Appen collects and annotates images, text, speech, audio, and video for the use of improving artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The company utilises its AI-assisted data annotation platform in conjunction with its 1 million global contractors, to provide solutions across a range of sectors.
Appen experienced what the company described as negligible impact on the first half-year results, when announced in August 2020. However, on 10 December, Appen provided a trading update to the contrary. The company advised that the usual ramp-up experienced in Q4 was not occurring, indicating that COVID-19 had interrupted business.
Underlying earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) for FY20 was revised to be between $106 million to $109 million. The company remains optimistic for the long-term performance, with spending on artificial intelligence growing at 28% annually.
PolyNovo Ltd (ASX: PNV)
This $2.43 billion mid-cap share is down 3.80% to $3.54 today, hitting a 1-month low.
PolyNovo is a medical device company based in Australia that primarily focuses on the design, development, and production of its patented dermal regeneration solution, NovoSorb BTM.
However, unlike Altium and Appen, PolyNovo has been all systems go without a material impact on the business. In a trading update in April 2020, the company recorded a record sales month in the US for March. As a result, sales grew 173% for the month compared to March in the previous year.
PolyNovo highlighted a significant increase in BTM sales, reaching $19.1 million in the FY20 results. Reportedly PolyNovo successfully entered new markets, improved gross margin, and secured US$15 million of funding from the United States Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
Most recently, PolyNovo announced it was bringing its breast device in-house to ramp up development. Chair David Williams stated, "We believe we can develop breast and a number of other devices more quickly on our own."
For context, the PolyNovo share price has rallied 90% in the last year. Though it has since retreated from its December high, slipping by 11.5%.
