Pat:
Thanks a lot for bringing this info up. I have been a lurker in this thread for a long time and haven't posted here for quite a while. Like many other amatians, the past couple of months have been brutally bloody as far as my amati holdings are concerned. I can't believe that we are getting closer to my original purchase price of $6 more than a year ago. I thought we would never see under $10 again, much less $7.50. The recent meltdown in price caused me to carefully examine the reasons for and against holding on to my amati investments. Some of the major points of consideration for me are:
-- Insider selling/lack of buying.
On the surface the regular frequency of insider selling (seem like every month there is some 144's filed) coupled with a lack of insider buying is very troubling. After further examination we find that most of the selling is by Cioffi and the fact that this selling has been going on in regular interval regardless of the price and that he has tons of shares remaining along with a large pool of unexercised options was assuring to me. Your post indicated that ALL of the officers has a sizeable stake in the company (shares and unexercised options), yet only Cioffi has been selling large amounts recently. As for lack of insider buying, if you had the choice of exercising an option at some time in the near future for $1/share versus spending some cash to buy shares today at $7.75, what is your choice? I am now much more comfortable with this situation.
-- Amati management.
The management's reputation has been under assault recently in this thread, e.g. "they have no business plan", "they are getting killed by Aware in partnership deals", "the PR/IR/Marketing is disastrous", "they don't do enough to support the stock", "they hype the stock", etc. The only thing that I am concerned with at this point is that their PR/IR/Marketing could use some improvement. It is too early to pass judgement on their business plan or the execution of that plan. Upcoming contracts or lack thereof will ultimately tell us whether management is to its task or not. The preliminary indications in the partnership deals inked to date is certainly a good sign. I certainly feel much better about the deal with MOT, TI & NEC all of them industry heavyweigths than any of the nonexclusive, chickenfeed deals with any and everybody who are trying to get into ADSL on the cheap.
As for hyping/supporting the stock, I hope they continue the conservative practice of only puting out substantive press releases. I would rather have no release that some meaningless/trivial news release just to support the stock price. I understand how difficult it is for shareholder during a downturn, but it is better in the long run for management to maintain credibility. The one mistake that I thought they made was in giving you the impression (accidentaly or on purpose?) of an imminent press release concerning the HK contract last fall without emphasizing their total lack of control over the timing of any HK press release. This along with the subsequent statement denying any "rumoured" contract anouncement on the internet as "baseless" was a mistake that I think continue to contribute to the skepticism of many investors to this day. Overall, I am cautiously confident in this area. Lets hope that experienced hands in the board (Gibbons and others) will make sure that the good ship Amati will reach its ultimate destination.
-- Amati Products.
This is the one major reason that many of us are investing in Amati. As time rolls on I am becoming more and more supremely confident in Amati's position as a leader here. There has been so much bruhaha about DMT vs CAP, but after clearing all the CrAP this is what we have:
- Amati's O4 & O8 modems have been on real life trials for some time now. They are operating on speeds up to 8M/640K with high granularity rate adaptivity, have been used on various application, including VOD. I have seen perhaps a gazillion press releases from the CAP camp about their 7M RADSL CAP modems. Do these modem really exist today (NOW) outside of the imaginations of the CAPers, or are they just pronouncements about the future posibilities. I have yet to see a report of an actual real life trial of the CAP RADSL modem operating at close to 7M NOW, heck, I haven't seen any reported real life CAP modem trialing at anything over 1.5M NOW. If anybody knows otherwise, lets here about it! The refusal of the CAP camp to submit any modems for direct head to head testing with Amati's O4 in a recent telechoice sponsored testing makes me wonder what they are trying to hide.
- Amati DMT vs Other DMT
I haven't seen any performance comparison of Amati's O4/O8 modems compared to other DMT modems from Orckit and Aware. If somebody has the info on this please post it here, it would be interesting to see. The only outside indication I could remember was that GTE was testing with Amati, Westell and Aware in the begining, and later on droped Aware from the trials. Perhaps somebody can shed some light on the reasons behind GTE's decision.
Pat, thanks once again for all your efforts at keeping all of us informed. All of the above are, of course, IMHO.
Regards,
Edward |
