Correction: Fred Gibbons used to be both the President and CEO, now he is only the CEO and the new President runs day-to-day operations. I've talked to some of the new managers at Comdex during a SPC demo and the Chief Financial Officer himself actually gave the demo instead of a corporate account rep/mgr like myself used to give. I would say the new team is heavily invested into stock options and are really determined to get this company moving.
However, with Fred still calling the shots to a certain extent, they still tend to act reactively instead of proactively to new market situations and so are not as competitive as they could be. Basically, they really lucked out with purchasing HG and then had an excellent team of developers who turned it into the best business graphics package on the market during the late 80's/early 90's. But they really missed the boat by delaying the introduction of HG 3.0 DOS and also HG for Windows.
SPC has been buying up products still since they had a considerable cash kitty but they still haven't been able to buy any new home runs.
I'm not sure SPC has the resources to tie their graphics intelligent stuff into internet browsers or JAVA stuff. If they had been able to make inroads into this area, you would have already seen it in Netcruiser or Explorer but we haven't.
I'm continuing to hold on just for the heck of it. If they do get bought out, then the stock will probably ride up a few points. Right now the stock's at 3, so I would try to get in at 2 1/2 or 2 1/4 if at all possible.
Intuition wise? Well I really thought '95 would be the year SPC turns things around but so far '96 appears to be more of the same. It's a real long shot as to whether their products and technology will turn things around given that basically Fred lucked out with HG and then missed introduction dates and Windows 3.0 introduction. They've worked on diversifying their product line in a number of areas and haven't done so well.
What the heck, it'll probably go up to at least 4 if they get bought out, they still have something like 10million in the bank, they're not going out of business anytime soon, and once they stop having quarterly losses, this stock will turn around nicely to at least 5 or 6 if you hold onto it for 6 to 9 months.
KH |
