I’m stretching my penny stock search a little here, but this one has recorded one of the best 12-month performances I’ve ever seen. I’m looking at Hardide (LSE: HDD), a company that does tungsten carbide coatings, nanostructured chemical vapour deposition coatings, and other things like that. Maybe that doesn’t sound too glamorous, but what a year!
At 105p at the time of writing, the Hardide share price is a little above the usual 100p cut-off for penny stocks. But the company’s market cap still fits, at £83m. And a year ago the shares were changing hands at only 7.5p. A one-year gain of 1,300% is exactly the kind of thing penny share investors are looking for.
Painful background
Stocks usually get down to penny valuations for a common reason: something has gone wrong. And that’s the case here. Hardide floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) back in 2005.
But through a combination of investing heavily in production, turnover not growing as fast as hoped, and losses building up… it soon hit the skids. Isn’t that a similar story to many over-ambitious stock market debuts?
The company survived a cash crisis through an emergency equity issue and loan in 2008. Since then, we’ve seen multiple further fundraising rounds, diluting early shareholders along the way. And the share price really went nowhere… until late 2025.
So what happened to kick off such a storming share price performance? In a word, profit!
Stunning recovery
Aerospace business was picking up. And then on 1 December 2025, the company announced “orders from a major new North American customer in the energy sector with an aggregate value of £1.75m.” The boss said…
In the immediate future it will enable us to build on last year’s strong revenue growth of over 25%. It also brings us an important step closer to achieving our strategic milestone of more than doubling FY24’s revenues to over £10m as soon as possible, leveraging existing spare capacity to generate attractive operating margins.
CEO Matt Hamblin, 1 December 2025
Hardide hit positive earnings in 2025 for the first time in years — just 0.2p per share, but the direction was right. And net debt was falling. Since then, through 2026, further orders have been coming in.
Forecasts suggest 5.4p earnings per share for 2026, for a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.4. And that would drop to around 13.5 based on 2027 expectations.
So what now?
Back to CEO Matt Hamblin, in July’s trading update…
We are now focused on doubling revenues again from current year levels and diversifying our customer base over the next few years.
If management can pull that off, I see potential for further share price growth.
My main caution is that the firm currently relies heavily on one major customer. And without a super-cheap stock valuation, we could be in for short-term share price weakness.
I’ll always balance a potential investment like this as part of a diversified Stocks and Shares ISA. And as it happens, I know just the stocks I’m eyeing up to achieve that balance…
Should you invest £5,000 in Hardide right now?
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And right now, Mark thinks there are 6 standout stocks that investors should consider buying. Want to see if Hardide made the list?
Alan Oscroft does not hold any positions in the companies mentioned.
