Ram,
Yeah. I have to agree, Hampshire was not the best
investment bank. The fact is I think if the MRV
founders were more ambitious from the get-go and better
at forming companies, they
should have just asked for Venture Capital and use
Goldman Sachs for an IPO.
If you follow MRV's history, they used 10,000 dollars
of Shlomo's funds in the 80's and bankrolled it to
what it is now. Impressive feat in terms of percentage.
But in exchange, they sacrificed by accepting low salaries,
accepting less reputable investment banks to do the IPO,
less visibility, no technical help from venture capital firms,
etcetera.
I mean, look at Ciena. Company is barely three years old.
They had a grandiose business plan, got venture capital, and
a few years later its market cap billions of dollars.
But I also think, that precisely because of the lack of
visibility, and some missteps by the CFO, MRVC gets to trade
at such low valuations (amidst the Cisco cloud) that we
can take advantage.
You can almost compare MRVC to CIENA like "Inn and Out" (a
California buger chain that serves really good burgers) to McDonald's. One is a family-owned type of corporation , the other is a large cap publicly traded corporation. Money begets money. And if MRV had more money to start with (just add a few zeroes to the ten thousand dollars) then they could be a multi billion dollar market cap right now.
But we'll see, the future of the wired technology is still
pretty bright and big ... |
