He is silent now...
I apologize for disappearing so abruptly from the thread. When it became apparent to me last year that WIND really was struggling to maintain top-line growth, not to mention earnings, I was confused. The undeniable slowdown was inconsistent with my personal view of all the things that should have been driving revenues up and up -- like the title I chose for this thread.
After discussing my confusion with company management, I volunteered to go inside to look deep for an understanding. Unfortunately, I felt I could not even sign off the thread for fear of sending a negative message to the market. Even today I find it difficult to explain my relationship to the company.
My first attempt in Alameda at figuring out what was going on was quick and dirty, and perforce was limited to macro-economic modeling. It was good enough to identify important aspects of the growth problem, but it was not sufficiently sensitive to details to enable me to differentiate between two primary possible causes: (1) The Asian crisis and (2) competitive pressures.
I consulted to the company a couple of times prior to the Q2(FY00) close out and conference call to help out, and began a more detailed examination of the growth problem. Since there are always data problems when working with literally many thousands of operational design win data, it took until November before the people in the company helping me could get the data organized in the form I needed. By early November I knew the answer. In the meanwhile TSD had just recently come on-board and was getting his sea legs, and the ISI merger was announced. Since growth appeared to have hit bottom in Q1, and operational problems obviated the urgency of this kind of analysis, it was time for me to return to the thread -- once I became uncontaminated with insider information.
In consultation with the company, the 8-K release signifies that the combined WIND is NOT materially the company I knew so much about, and therefore I am comfortable now returning to the thread.
BTW, I was out of touch in Europe when the market fell out of bed. I arrived back last night hopefully to witness a wild and wooly bottom. This is a great market to comment about.
Allen
Disclaimer: I am very long the company, but from time to time I might sell or buy stock in the company. I feel free to discuss many things about the company, but I have no intention of delving into personalities. Finally, I will still try to confine my observations to things about the company that are known publicly, even though I doubt there remains much material that I know that you do not.
Major Disclaimer: Anything I say about the company going forward is my opinion and does not necessarily reflect reality or the inside view of the company. |
