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Biotech / Medical : VVUS: VIVUS INC. (NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taki who wrote (18948)	2/19/1999 4:35:00 PM
From: VLAD	Respond to of 23519

Taki, No offense but you come waltzing in here buying Vivus shares under $3.00 and get impatient and upset when you don't get your quintuple bagger in 2 weeks. Many of the loyal Vivus longs here are holding thousands of shares and need to see double digits just to break even. We have become used to being patient and have learned an important lesson regarding the importance of excellent management. Vivus has a good product in a growing market. Vivus management proclaimed that we would be "riding the coat tails" of Viagra back in early 1998 as they foolishly burned through their precious cash buying back 1.7M shares at over $14/share, blew another $5M on their failed "dirrect to consumer campaign", and lost many more millions training a rental rep sales force that they could only afford to keep for less than 2 months. All this foolish spending at a time when the company also needed to sink about $20M into the new production facility. The famed "coat tail" effect never materialized and instead Vivus lost 70% of its domestic product sales and burned through the cash so fast and foolishly that they couldn't even afford to keep ANY of their sales force. OK, it's all water under the bridge at this point in time. Vivus management failed to properly assess the impact of Viagra on product sales and when the prime time came(about September 1998) to capitalize on marketing MUSE's excellent safety profile AND the Viagra failures, Vivus didn't have a cent to spend on sales/marketing since they so FOOLISHLY pissed it all away on worthless expendatures! Sorry to get down on you but you aren't going to see any type of sharp appreciation until Vivus inks a domestic partner. So far we have no partner and we continue to take a SEVERE beating. We know that Vivus has a good product that can sell well in the US market but it won't happen without a sales force educating the PCPs. No sales force = no significant increase in stock price = no significant appreciation in stock price. We long holding longs accept that in the short term, Vivus stock price is dependent on the domestic partnering agreement. Europe and eventual opening of other international markets will certainly help us in the longer term. And consider exactly who is in charge of negotiating the deal for Vivus. It's the same guy has been in charge all along. He is the one you need to talk to. Tell HIM how you really feel!