Scott, as a holder of the stock I can understand your frustration with the company and you make some very good points on what a business is supposed to be (do) and, implicitly, what a financial officer's chief objective should be, i.e., increasing shareholder value. Perhaps ISSI's communications problems in the past account for its
reluctant reporting now. In any case, no amount of cheer leading or press releases is going to alter the current problems of supply/demand, competition, and pricing afflicting the commodity. A year or two ago, Jimmy Lee listed CY, ALSC, PRDM, and IDTI as their chief competitors. Would you be far happier with any of them? To one degree or another they are all suffering from the same industry malaise. Certainly, ALSC and IDTI have more knowledgable and active cheer leading sections on the Web. Lee has always stressed their leadership in "process technology" or "process engineering (rather fuzzy terms), continued diversification away from SRAM only, (although it certainly remains the core of their business), and their new product initiatives in high speed DRAM and imbedded memory applications(certainly promising). We are all tired of being "cautiously optimistic" about SRAM pricing and waiting for the cycle to turn but, hopefully, patience will pay off. |
