Marc,
Generally, I agree with you. They are many ways to discourage takeover attempts. They already have issued class B shares which vote 5 to 1. Poison pill preparations can also be made.
I'm getting concerned about the number of shares outstanding. For such a small company, the number is unusually high. It's gonna take a ton of real earnings to move the stock if and when the company loses its story stock status. To earn $1/share, they have to net $50 million. That's not an insignificant number to reach. Its alot of meters with lots of content flowing. How far is that away? I don't know, 2 or 3 years? sooner?
We all realize that in order to keep good folks around, companies have to build in incentives. However, immediate vesting scares me. There's no dangling carrot and nothing to prevent someone from up and running off with their shares. A better plan that I like is an incremental vesting approach. After two years of service, 20% become vested. A quarter later, another 20% frees up, and so on.
I don't want to get hung up on this either, but something bothers me about it. I don't mind employees and stockholders getting rich, if the company makes it, they deserve it. I do mind employees getting rich at the expense of the stockholders. I'm not insinuating this is happening or going to happen, it's just something one should evaluate and be aware of as an investor in a public company. I've seen this happen before.
---SC |
