Pretty far back, Jimpy. Oren L. Benton was a Colorado uranium trader that had a cheap source in Russia; by political lobbying, his source was blocked, and he could not deliver. He had extensive business interests and invested ~100 million or so in Ramtron over the years. Now some seven million or so shares have been placed in a liquidating trust by the bankruptcy court, or so we were recently told. Everyone assumes that the shares will not be dumped on the market (they can't be that stupid) but will be transferred in a block at some discount that is probably now under negotiation....Benton has some backing to put in a bid himself, I think. He would not regain control.
The founders and early "suits" at Ramtron were somewhat, er, controversial, I'm told, and that is one reason why some of the technical people split off to form a company called Symetrix, which has not made a lot of news recently. Benton should be given credit for the survival of Ramtron in the early days, but that era is now history.
Right now, for example, the RMTR bulls reason that Cubic Corp. would not have signed a deal for a lot of FRAM if they were not assured that the supply would appear. One can apply a similar line of thought to the DEC/VLSI support for ESDRAM -- presumably a serious examination of the technical issues produced a positive conclusion. So, absent some unexpected bad news, it appears that Ramtron is out of the woods. Mike Gumport has summarized the bull's case in various notes that temporarily appear at the Lehman site. If you click on my name you might find a few.
Regards, Logan |
