PI is now trading at 23 a slight dip from its old hi of 60 back in July. The ceo says the co is doing great they have not lost market share and has no idea why sales r weak.
Guidance was flat w expanding losses.
Wasn’t this one a favorite 6 to 12 months ago?
Anyone still in it?
Why would the CEO not know why sales are weak? That’s a tad concerning…
I held PI for most of 2017. It was up 103%. Then they had a bad quarter and it dived. The revenue growth had put on the serious brakes. I read the conference call transcript and was starting to get concerned.
Then Q3 happened. Growth slowed to a standstill. For a small company with about $35 million in revenue a quarter that is not good. I read the call again. Management left me no confidence in them going forward. They did not know why the growth was a problem or why IC shipments forecasts were not going anywhere. They did not have a very good vision going forward. They kept coming back to we think we’re in the first innings of the “second adoption wave” but in my opinion did not offer compelling evidence.
The fact that AmazonGo is now live and open to the public without RFID blew a big hole in my investment thesis. If you can have a cashierless store that doesn’t need tracking chips and is successful by using machine vision and AI, what else can that technology solve that RFID was promising to solve? There was a lot of hype that Amazon was going to be a big user of PI. I have a feeling that many potential companies that were looking into RFID are taking a wait and see attitude With the rapid emergence of AI. My friend once asked me when we were talking about PI “is that something that a company like CGNX could do better without putting a chip in everything?” I wish I had taken that foresight more into consideration.
For those reasons I sold at about a 20% loss. A long and painful fall from up 103%
I had sold a PUT on it and was assigned as it fell. I decided to sell and take the loss as they seem to have no visibility into their market, Tom