John, Hi! I met you at the shareholders meeting. I was one of the attentive listeners by whom you were surrounded. (You called yourself Cleve?) After I heard the interesting things you had to say, I approached Carl Lutts and asked if he was familiar with your ideas. He said he’d looked at your materials and had not found them persuasive. "I didn’t see anything of substance there" was how he put it. I was surprised because you are clearly knowledgeable. I also asked Bob Verrando (President PRST) about
competition from the press you cited, CREO, as the main impending competition and he was clearly, it appeared to us, unconcerned about, though not unaware of, CREO. (I discussed this earlier on this site.)
John, It was my impression, and my husband’s, that you acknowledged at the meeting that the technical problem that resulted in shipping delays from Heidelberg (i.e. redesign of a cleanup component of some sort) had been solved. Did we misunderstand you? Bob Verrando’s off-the-record personal estimate of the number of Heidelberg Quickmasters that will be installed by end of FY 96 is 200, and by end FY 97, it is1000. I mentioned to him your concern that Heidelberg would stop ordering presses if they shipped them out so slowly there was an inventory build up. He dismissed that concern, though what that means I don’t know. I’m wondering why cancellations exceed orders, if you are accurate, since no one doesn’t like the press. Maybe it’s because of shipping delays. What do you think it could be? You ordered one in March of 95, I think, and still don’t have it. I agree with you that the Presstek exec’s response to your complaint about how long it was taking was unresponsive – referring you to Heidelberg, essentially. But maybe that was proper. Still, it is worrisome. Either Heidelberg is or isn’t getting the presses out now. Someone knows this answer. Lutts should certainly be interested in this question.
My husband and I had a different reaction from yours to certain aspects of the shareholders’ meeting. For example, though you were seated, my husband and I were among the couple of hundred standees during the opening formalities, the long speech, the slide presentation, and the question period. It must have been pushing two hours before the meeting was adjourned, and it seemed to us standees not an abrupt adjournment at all, in fact not a moment too soon, especially since the execs all stuck around and talked to anyone who wanted to approach them.
We talked on this thread about insider sales before you joined us, so I won’t recap, but I ended up feeling there was no cause for alarm. In summary, the sales are a drop in a large bucket.
We also had a very different impression of whether it’s a fair characterization say that the processless thermal technology you talked about was acknowledged by PRST to represent any sort of impending threat. I felt they were skeptical about its image quality, and singularly unthreatened in general. Presstek is NOT STANDING STILL, remember. They are heavily into R&D, in both PRST itself and in Catalina. Thomas Engelsma made reference in a posting here to how impressive Presstek is in its ongoing R&D.
But the information you offer in posting #158 regarding production rate is very disconcerting. I hope Neil Mack can come up with some good research on this too. I have to say that we perceived nobody from Presstek being upset as you felt they were, at your information. Though I can see from their point of view that they might not want to appear to accept as gospel whatever some person seated in the audience offered in the way of information. Though I think they know you. Do they? It’s an impression I get.
Back to an insider trading thought, John. If I were director Robert Howard and believed somebody, somewhere, was going imminently to improve on my technology, do it cheaper, and not infringe my patents, I wouldn’t sell only 66,000 shares common and post to sell just another 125,000 when I still had 1,041,724 shares left!
A couple of thing bothered me at the time we talked, John. I’m going to be frank, I hope you don’t mind. One was that you had come all the way from Oregon to go to this shareholders meeting in NY, and when someone asked why you’d come so far for this you replied that you "know some people who have an interest in this". I couldn’t help but wonder if they were short Presstek. That would be a nightmare situation to be in. Also, you appeared to us to have some sort of connection to CREO, at least we got that impression from your very vocal advocacy for CREO as opposed to PRST. You mentioned that it was soon going public (you gave a rough date). You also showed us diagrams of a press similar to CREO’s, I believe you said, that you yourself are designing and raising money for. These aren’t negative things about you at all; I don’t mean to imply that they are. To the contrary, your sharing your impressive knowledge is great for us PRST shareholders.
But you can see how, from my personal point of view, when I know there are shortsellers bashing this stock every day, your coming so far to go to a meeting, acknowledging a connection to someone with "an interest", having a Heidelberg on order yourself, raising money for a competitive press of your own design, and in general seeming pretty overtly hostile to PRST (as opposed to simply skeptical) – well, all this can’t help but make me wonder why you’re so… well, invested, or should I say counter-invested, in this stock. It seems so personal, somehow. Would you be willing to tell us the personal story behind your anger toward the PRST people, or technology, or stock? I’d be very interested.
My husband just called in to say that it bothers him that instead of asking your questions to the assembled PRST officials after the formal part of the meeting, taking advantage of their offer to stay and talk informally, you restricted yourself to saying very bearish things about the technology and the stock to the attentive people gathered around you and to the journalist from Bloomberg who was taking notes on everything you said against the company. I hope you’ll tell us more, you’re clearly very knowledgeable about the whole field. And tell what’s going on between you and Presstek! There’s a lot of emotion here. For example, why do you care about convincing Cabot that PRST insn’t a great stock? You’re a mystery man, somehow. I did enjoy talking to you. What a small world it is.
Bottom line I can’t escape, although I’m open to persuasion and do have a lot at stake: The Presstek press is the state of the art technology. Even you have ordered one. And they are hyper-aggressive in R&D. And they think there are real technical problems with CREO’s spraying technique (and maybe patent infringement too). And CREO is way behind! It’s not even a publicly traded company yet. |
