To All:
Yes I did attend the annual BioSource meeting on Friday morning. While I don't know where the company is headed, I do know that Aspasia Alexander is quite good looking. She is a beauty with brains, what a combo. But seriously here is how the meeting went in order:
Introductions - Same as any meeting, lots of Phds in the room.
1996 action recap of company activity - Ya know, the "we did great..." stuff.
1997 stock buy back program is in progress - As I understood it, the stock buy back is in place to offset all new options granted to avoid footnote dilution's. So 46,000 shares have been bought back to date to offset the 40,000 or so options that have been granted. The bottom line here is that the total shares outstanding will not change, thus no effect on the bottom line.
Proxy votes tallied - Same directors and KPMG voted back in.
Slide show/Video presentation - Interesting stuff, but way over my head as it was very technical. My guess is very few people in the room understood what they were seeing.
Discussion of company direction - Research to diagnostics, new products include: ELISA MOUSE and RAT IL-12, RANTES kits; Molecular Diagnostics -specifically: Infectious disease, minimum residual disease (breast cancer, leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), human, mouse, and rat. Research ASSAYS.
Growth strategy - Release new products, Licensing, Acquisitions, Align with corporate partners.
Q&A - Not much interest in the room to ask questions, but I did manage to ask about the currency problems and how they plan to address this in the future. Answer from CEO: no plan to hedge because it is too complicated and costly. (humm, wheat and pig farmers do every day. Is it really that complicated???) Another guy asked about the apparent inventory problems. Answer from CFO: "this is a common question" (she seemed to respond with a slight aire of condescension to me). Anyway, she said half is here and half in Europe and that due to long lead times and same day promises to customers on finished goods they must carry large raw and WIP inventories. (This is BS, I am a materials manger by profession and if the proper tools and people are in place, materials can be managed effectively regardless of lead time). In any case, she did say they plan to have the inventory levels reduced by December. We'll see. Two other questions were
inaudible to me. I think one came from a Wall Street analyst and it was somewhat technical -he seemed to like the response from the CEO.
Summary:
It was a well run, very professional meeting. It ran for about an hour. Most attendees looked like retirees there, well, just to do something I guess...hehehe. The CEO is a fairly soft-spoken guy, but quite intelligent. My impression is similar to what someone on this thread said earlier, "a lot of scientists with no business sense." or something like that. I was not impressed at all with the CFO - Anna Anderson. She seemed a bit frazzled and her response to the one question asked about the inventories was lame.
However, I do think I will hang with BIOI until the end of the year and see what happens. Shit, It can't get much worse. They have lots of cash, great ratios (except inventory), a strong book value, and a killer P/E. The stock value has no where to go but up. I just hope they can get a little more aggressive on the currency front, pair down the inventories, and sell, sell, sell.
Best regards,
Tim |
