...the drop can be tracked back to several things; the central component of the 'real' drop was time warner selling shares of ntop that aol had from before the .com bust. (that what i belive they just did; they had to file when they dropped under 5% as they were selling and they did that. i emailed investor relations at time warner, and the response was to 'look' at this url and this filing. then, i think time warner kept selling. time warner has a voip solution; aol is coming out with a voip solution March 16. AOL may be using TW's solution; but i don't know that for sure).
At the time of the initial time warner filing, the info was so confusing a number of blogs thought aol was buying ntop shares. But they weren't; those were shares aol held from before the bust. For example, yahoo held three times as many ntop shares at that time, and dumped them on the market to survive, which everyone is aware put ntop's own survival at risk.
that whole scenario led to them pursuing cable telephony, on their own (not through at&t); and at&t had to sell assets, inlcuding ntop and cable, in order to survive. in the end at&t is going to sbc.
so that's the main line for the cascade down. as the share price dropped, people sold into it. and then people have been posting 'it really has a different low' because that's the low they'd like to be long from.
..a couple of weeks before the start of the tw sale, idt went to liberty media, seeking to get control of ntop. there is an agreement beween liberty media and idt (ntop holdings) where they jointly held the shares each purchased back from at&t. that agreement expired december 31. (liberty media is also in news corps./rupert murdoch) face, and depending on how that turns out ... liberty media (not liberty media international, or ucoma) would be split in two ... with each unit being ipo'ed. that's one of the scenarios. so while it is absolutely true (imo) jonas wanted control of ntop; he also didn't want someone else to be able to have input to management decisions about ntop. and if those ntop shares stayed under the liberty media umbrella, he was vulnerable to that. he is still vulnerable, to what happens with the increased idt shares owned by liberty media. but he's sheltered ntop, and he would certainly try to have a gain re what happened between idt and liberty media.
ntop has yet to gain back retail support. so dddc (delta3) is doing well, but i don't personally think they will hold those gains. could be wrong; but it's a SIP voIP solution being sold to telecom carriers (including sbc, and so now sbc has dddc as a voip solution; at&t's call vantage as a voip solution; and before going after at&t they were going to develop a packetcable voip solution (higher qos). neither dddc's nor att's voip solutions are packet cable.
what was going before the drop in ntop's share price (people trying to keep gains) was that the share price for ntop had finally (coming out of the bust) moved ahead of the wholesale voip carriers, and was also above packet8's. with the change in control and the two sale, ntop's share price dropped. packet8 held above ntop's ... but it has been dropping steadily back, so that the different in prices is not that much.
there was also the bad month for stocks in january, and that had people taking gains. the trend was down.
what i am figuring will happen is that once again ntop's share price moves above packet8's. that's my personal opinion gained from reading what the value is in what each offers. again packet8 has retail support (itxc, a wholesale carrier, had retail support, and is now owned by teleglobe -- every four itxc shares = one telglobe share; the price came out at $10 when it hit the market; and then it dropped to the mid $3's, and is now around $5.)
ntop as a leader is being questioned in the sense that it has to have more deals. i think it has the better solution -- or better solutions -- because it has SIP, packetcable, wi-fi, and satellite voip solutions. it has idt back of it, so it has a telecom carrier as support. i think that ntop needs to be a separate company however; as that lets cable companies focus on ntop as a cable voip enabler for them. overseas, liberty media international is the only tier 1 carrier. all other cable msos are tier 2 and lower. and tier 2 and lower is ntop's niche globally. not that they wouldn't have wanted a tier 1 in the u.s.
so, what i think i will see is that however the share prices between ntop and packet8 work out, ntop's will be higher. that's where all the validation had pushed it after the bust, finally. there isn't another aol/time warner out there with shares to sell. with the tw move (it probably happened; there is no filing), that ended the first stage dot.com era for ntop, and they are now a second stage company.
there was darn little ntop press a year ago; it all went to vonage. it doesn't all go to vonage anymore. right now the mix was supposed to be about cable msos rolling out voip, and instead it's about the baby bells buying the long haul carriers (which aren't surviving well -- they have to pay the bells for local carriage). those bells have to move to voip, but even as the cable tier 1s carry circuit switched telephony, all the bells have is circuit switched telephony. they have to move, putting fiber in can take years, and their income will drop as voip surfaces into the telephony market.
that last part -- about where ntop's share price will go .. i don't want to answer. i can point out that the speculation is that it gets to $5.5 -$6 and then you have to have to look and see what happened in the interim. what ntop has going for it beyond people hyping it, wanting it higher. ntop needs secure deals in place; it needs more rollouts, always more rollouts. as long as they manage that.
i think i'd let alroy do his thing. michael pastor at ntop is in charge of the cable telephony division. he is the same age as alroy. he is really good. i'd give them the benefit of the doubt about the management change, and alroy. let's see how strategic a thinker he is. that is what he did at idt.
ntop has a bunch of deployments going active right now. that's new. heck, there are voip blogs out there now, that had no role a year ago. the hughes thing is being set up as up and coming, but ntop and hughes a deal a year ago. what happened is that in december of '04 hughes deployed a new 'NOC" -- or center for calls to the mideast, europe, and africa. that what the hughes engagement is about. there had been no new development re ntop and satellite, for a year. now hughes is becoming active, using a particular satellite that went up in 2004 i think. the center was developed after the satellite was active; and hughes is only using ntop for voip.
highspeedsat.com
..lastly i think ntop's share price stablilized. an indication of this is that in the last couple of weeks, there has been increased institutional trading in ntop. to me anyway, that means somebody there saw a bottom, and looked at what it meant for them in 2005.
so substract out what you think is the hype. i tried to keep it grounded, but it's me. i post the news here, because with all that goes on on other boards, if anyone really wants to look at it, like you did, you can see what is actually done vis a vis news re voip and ntop as company with a business model trying to get deals, sans people setting things up for personal gain, which may or may not be what ntop is trying for. |
