Can anyone give me a reason to continue to own this stock?
It certainly doesn't seem like either the company or the market is going to provide a reason any time soon. Its so frustrating to see so much potential, and see it go nowhere.
I've owned WIND for about three years. I just pulled up a three year chart, and it showed that over the last three years, WIND stock price is down about 10%. Can anyone name any company involved in any way with the infrastructure of the internet that is down over the last three years.
The quality of the news coming out of the company is absolutely terrible. Not only is it nonexistent for the most part, but what there is is primarily technically oriented (product releases) or negative (such as stories about Linux taking over the world, casually mentioning that the established embedded players such as WIND are likely to lose market share and face shrinking margins). Nowhere do I see evidence of Wind attempting to offset such negative press, either by sending the author better information or in the press releases that are put out.
Wind desperately needs to hire a quality PR firm, or bring someone in-house who is up to the task. This company has a bunch of very smart people, but they all seem to be engineering oriented. There seems to be a certain amount of arrogance that one day the world will wake up and see what a fantastic company this is. As much as Wind needs to sell and market its products to its customers, they need to market the company to Wall Street. It is almost impossible for that type of marketing to be done by an engineer.
Having a one-day analyst seminar is a start, but that was almost two months ago. There needs to be a regular, continuous and focused stream of information about the company disseminated. Putting the slides on your website is nice, but only people who are already interested in Wind know that they are there. It would be more effective to make a press release out of some of the most exciting parts--such as the penetration in the cable modem/dsl modem/set top box markets. Come to think of it, I've never seen any type of press release issued by Wind on a car navigation system, even though I remember a high market share mentioned in a quarterly conference call--but again, only people already interested in Wind would have a reason to listen.
Wind often states that they are precluded from releasing information due to NDA's and other customer restrictions. Certainly some of this is justified, but it is hard for me to believe that out of thousands of design wins, the GoReader (nice start, but nowhere near enough) is the only product worthy of a press release this summer.
The very real costs that WIND incurs from its low and languishing stock price include more costly or not possible acquisitions, more developers focusing on Linux than on VxWorks, and more cash paid out for income taxes due to lower premiums on exercise of employee options.
Wind has 2.6 million of its shares sold short. You need to put fear in these short holders, and create an urgency on the part of potential buyers that tomorrow they will pay more for their shares, not less.
I'm tired of hearing that great things are going on inside the company, but no one can talk about them, so you just have to have trust. That way doesn't seem to be working--you should try something else. |
