peggylynn,
the analysts would have been expecting a strategic response specific to the MSFT ruling. Sending in the junior bookkeeper, in light of the market anxiety over the issue, obviously did not inspire a great deal of investor confidence.
As you also mentioned, this isn't the first time Citrix has had this problem. I understand and appreciate your concern.
On the other hand, there have also been problems where management has explained over a period of many quarters what they expected to happen of a somewhat negative nature, and when it finally happened the investment community punished the stock. And there are press people blatantly and inaccurately writing about the huge revenues the ASP movement has provided the company over the last two years. So it's not as if the investment community pays a huge amount of attention to management.
Management has repeatedly taken the position that theirs is a long-term view. Anyone who might attend that conference should be the first people to fully understand before anyone walks toward the podium the great strides Citrix has taken to distance itself from the dire dependency upon Microsoft. Those same people should also be the first to understand that Microsoft won't be broken up for at least two years if at all.
And that leads to the real point of my post. You wrote that "investors decided that their hard-earned money might be more appreciated elsewhere since the Citrix CFO was either not prepared or couldn't be bothered to address legitimate investor concerns." Before I would agree with you, especially in light of my thinking stated above, I'd have to change the word "investor" to "speculator." Then I could agree with you. Investors would never, ever trash a company's market cap by over 10% because of such a short-term concern as the CFO feeling it is appropriate to send someone else to the podium.
Investors wouldn't do that but speculators would. Just the opposite, investors might get their interest piqued as happened with me. We might wonder if there isn't some sort of critical negotiation going on that all of a sudden required the top financial guy, recognizing of course that the investment community has displayed a tendency to ignore a lot of what he's been saying all along.
I might at a later date come to the opinion that this was a terrible thing to do or an appropriate thing to do. Until I have more information about the situation I don't have an informed opinion and therefore have no opinion. That being the case, there's no reason justifying the lowering of the company's value by nearly 15% in a matter of hours.
The irony is that because of my long-term view I couldn't care less that the market cap was chopped today.
Just my opinion.
--Mike Buckley |
