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That rather makes someone pretty stipid if they cannot believe the company's story but they buy AND HOLD the company's stock anyway, doesn't it?
I mean, instead of buying a million shares of a $0.0001/share stock for $100 (plus brokerage fees) so that one could let that sit for months knowing that they were almost guaranteed to lose almost everything, wouldn't one be better off spending that same $100 on one hundred lottery tickets? At least with the lottery tickets, you would know the next day that all of your money was gone. Hey, last time I bought lottery tickets, I spent $200 and still won $15 back... so you never know.
Sorry to have to break the news to you... because it was not really news if you have been paying attention... but buying time for Adrian to get up-to-speed on the energy drink market is EXACTLY why you are here, or more specifically, why your money is in DNAX.
Adrian clearly stated during the April 20th conference call that he did not know the energy drink market, and he was learning as fast as possible what he needed to know to know how to be able to relaunch the energy drink product line.
If you were not okay with funding that fact, then you were pretty silly if you bought even a single share of DNAX after April 20th. Further, in that case, you were almost equally silly if you opted to hold any shares of DNAX that you bought before April 20th.
It was made very clear what the score was, and Adrian has freely admitted that all along. If you did not want to play under those terms, but decided to play anyway, you really have no one to blame but yourself.
As far as the notion goes that an experienced beverage executive would have been a better choice, of course it would have been better. However, no experienced beverage executive was going to be stupid enough to take on the high risk of attempting to reboot a failed, dormant beverage company. The chances are high that the attempt would fail, and that executive is not going risk damage to his personal reputation and personal marketing brand by plastering a huge failure all over himself. That is the sort of stuff that ends careers where executives are easy to find elsewhere.
We were lucky that anyone decided to attempt to pick up the pieces of what was left of DNA Brands, Inc. after the previous management ran it into the ground.
It costs roughly three dollars to ship a single can of DNA. The only way that shipping costs stop being huge is if one ships large quantities all together... such as shipping a whole pallet... like to a distributor.
No, when Adrian was still considering the viability of relaunching the energy drink product line, the point was NOT the shareholders at all.
The point was whether or not there was a financial path available to relaunch the energy drink product line which would be sufficiently PROFITABLE that it would both sustain the parameters of the initial relaunch AND provide funding for expansion.
If a relaunch could not do both, relaunching the energy drink product line would just be creating a money pit, and there would be no point.
This whole hypothetical scenario is completely a moot point. Walmart is very careful about screening their vendors. A business that does not have financials that are solid enough such that they would have no problem supplying Walmart with the needed inventory has ZERO possibility of being selected as a vendor for Walmart in the first place.
So, the idea that DNA could find "someone" willing to lend money to DNA to fill an order is completely erroneous. If DNA did not already have a dependable revenue stream to fund replenishment inventory without business from Walmart, DNA would not get any business from Walmart.
As Adrian freely admits, his background is not in the beverage industry. So, from that point of view, by definition Adrian did not start out in February knowing what he was doing.
I believe he re-engaged Parkside Beverage because at the time, he honestly believed the best path to successfully rebooting the company was through relaunch of the energy drink product line.
It is obvious that Adrian has now decided that is not the case, and the energy drink intellectual property will be sold off to fund acquisition of some other line of business.
If people did not find it acceptable to fund the education of a CEO not well versed in the beverage industry, they should not have bought DNAX when Adrian took over the company. Honestly, how did you think there would NOT be a learning curve for such a person?
In 2014, Mel raised the A/S to 6 billion. I think it had been 2 billion previously, but maybe even under 1 billion.
At that time, DNAX was still trading around $0.0011.
Six months before that, it was trading several times higher.
In 2014, DNAX got automatically downgraded from OTCQB to OTC Pink because of new rules put into place around May of 2014 that require an OTCQB stock price to be over one penny at least one day each month.
Around June of 2014 was the FIRST TIME in the company's history that the stock did not trade over one penny.
At one time, the stock traded over one dollar, and no, DNAX has never had a reverse split.
So, getting $27 million in equity to build the energy drink recipes would have been QUITE possible... even easy... in the time previous to 2014.
So, this article was published 7 days after the August 10th conference call.
It is extremely clear from this article that Adrian is going to move forward with selling the energy drink intellectual property, and convert DNA Brands, Inc. into a holding company. There is zero reason to believe at this point that Adrian will even try any further to acquire the $500,000 required to execute a viable reboot of the energy drink product line.
This does not surprise me. If there was a path to get there (viable relaunch of the energy drink product line) from here, I expect that Adrian would have already done it.
People who have access to half a million dollars did not get to that point by being stupid with their money.
No one, including Adrian, is going just give, or even loan, half a million dollars to DNA without some significant collateral.
Even without the typical 2:1 risk mitigation ratio offered to typical OTC Pinks, a 1:1 ratio would still require 5 billion shares of DNAX at the current $0.0001.
There is no particular indication that the market is willing to absorb another 5 billion 1's, and I think everyone in a position to produce $500,000 for DNA is aware of that fact.
As of right now, I don't think Adrian will get the money, and he does not strike me as someone willing to begin down a road where he knows he does not have what it takes to succeed.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I have never met Adrian or directly talked to Adrian (like on the phone), have not been to Florida in over a decade, and the single e-mail exchange that I had with him months ago was to inform him that the TA was providing people with an old contact phone number for DNA.
I disagree. I think Adrian has been legitimately been trying to learn what it would take to relaunch the energy drink product line.
If Adrian's objective from day 1 was to be a typical Pink scammer,, he would have reverse split the hell out of the stock immediately after taking control so he could start doing massive dilution right away.
However, I think what he learned is that the energy drink relaunch is likely a road too far if no one walks up to hand him a half a million dollars. I don't think that will happen.
Go get on YouTube and search for "DNA" as there are several reviews of the drinks there by people who had no reason to be biased. With the exception of one guy who did not like the orange flavor of the Citrus flavor, everyone thought the products were really good.
As for the guy who didn't like the orange taste, different people like different things. I didn't like the Molecular Melon flavor but though the others were all quite good, including the Cellular Citrus flavor.
Nothing sells well with essentially no advertising. As I have stated repeatedly, back in 2014, I visited more than 10 different QuikTrip stores in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. At each one, I purchased some DNA energy drinks. As the cashier was checking me out, I would ask how the products were selling.
In one store, the lady told me that she sells a good number of the coffee drinks... especially in the morning.
At a couple other stores, cashiers indicated that they had seen some cans be sold.
At all of the other stores, the cashiers were not even aware that their store sold DNA. This is in spite of the products being in coolers only 15 feet away from the checkout counter.
DNA's previous management had not even taken steps to insure that personnel working at retail stores where DNA was sold knew about the products. Further, previous management did nothing to inform prospective customers.
Adrian says that he needs $500,000 to execute a relaunch of the energy drink product line. If we take Adrian at his word, he walked into this business knowing nothing about the beverage industry. If we further take him at his word, he immediately sought a mentor from the beverage industry to help him get educated.
The appearance is that Adrian got temporarily sidetracked by selecting scam artist Costley as his mentor. The appearance also is that very soon after the April 20th conference call, Adrian realized he was getting conned and he took corrective action.
If we further take Adrian at his word, he then contacted the team who designed the energy drink recipes at Parkside Beverage (and we know that is true because the people at Parkside said so on Facebook).
If we continue to take Adrian at his word, he learned about what it would take to execute an effective advertising campaign by discussing it with a first rate advertising firm.
If we continue to take Adrian at his word, he found an authentic mentor from the beverage industry who introduced him to people who work in distribution and retail of beverages so that Adrian could learn what it would take to be successful in the execution of a relaunch of the energy drinks.
After acquisition of that necessary knowledge, Adrian concluded it would take $500,000 to execute an effective relaunch. I am willing to bet over 90% of that would be for advertising, because that it what one needs to EFFECTIVELY launch a beverage in the crowded, cutthroat beverage sector.
Previously, under the previous management, DNA did not sell as well as it should have sold because there was no EFFECTIVE advertising campaign.
I know some will simply refuse to take Adrian at his word, and they are determined that Adrian is just one more con artist in a whole group of OTC Pink can artists.
You might be right. I have no way to say definitively otherwise.
What I do know is that the appearance is that a guy who took over a dormant energy drink business, but knew nothing about the beverage sector took the required time to identify good resources to enable him to get properly educated. It also appears that he did not spend that much money to get it done.
Further, with the exception of slipping the "early 3rd quarter" estimate for production to "4th quarter," it does not appear that Adrian has lied to us. I don't even consider that a lie. I expect that at the time, Adrian was listening to the B.S. that Costley was spawing, and Adrian was just repeating what he was told without understanding that Costley was full of it.
What it appears is that Adrian is a guy who wants to bootstrap the business back into something real.
It also appears that he got to a point in his education where he realized that relaunch of the energy drinks was going to require more cash than he can acquire.
Hence, the decision by Adrian to seek other options is the result of Adrian's education.
I don't like the idea that the energy drink intellectual property may be sold off leaving DNA, from a product standpoint, no better than any of the other OTC Pink companies that actually have some sort of product.
The thing that made DNA particularly promising, from a profit potential point-of-view, is the world class energy drinks.
Can Adrian still find a way to get half a million dollars in funding to relaunch the energy drinks? I suspect that he is still checking other possibilities and that is why he has not executed the sale of the energy drink intellectual property yet.
However, considering that it has always been obvious that what Adrian really wants to build is a multi-corporation conglomerate, and not an energy drink company, I think it is fair to say that unless Adrian stumbles into some really good source of funding, he WILL sell off the energy drink product line.
Shareholders have two choices: sell your shares at $0.0001 (and the volume is not zero so it is still possible) or else wait to see what Adrian does.
If you know about the filings, and are not satisfied with the numbers that the filings provide, why ask on this forum if anyone knows what amount of revenue the energy drinks had previously provided.
Obviously, right or wrong, the filings provide the best numbers available. There simply is nothing more accurate that exists (or at least not where this forum could access such information).
The filings with the SEC, and then later the filings with OTC Markets, are all there and available for people to read. Sales information is clearly listed.
1) DNA Brands, Inc. currently no cash to bring the energy drinks back to market. Adrian's own estimate is that it will take $500,000 to do a creditable effort to bring the energy drinks back to the market.
2) DNA Brands, Inc. currently has no cash to purchase another business.
3) Adrian has provided no indication that he has any plan to obtain funds required to execute any plan regarding points #1 or #2 EXCEPT for the sale of the energy drink intellectual property.
Even when they are not truthful, you at least learn the fact of what they claimed to be the truth.
This is simply my opinion, as one can waste their own cash as desired, but I think that if one doesn't want to spend the time and effort to perform due diligence, it is really foolhardy to buy an OTC stock for anything other than a 1 or 2 tick flip. I have no problem with the flipping strategy. When the volume was much higher, I made several thousand a week doing flips. However, I didn't hold those stocks long enough to go find discussion forums to chat about those stocks.
No, my point is that there used to be other people on this forum who would contribute FACTS which they found by this thing we call READING. Because everyone has limited time, it was valuable to have everyone share the important facts they found about the company through their digging for those facts. We all were much smarter about the company together because lots of people contributed to the knowledge base.
Now, people cannot be bothered to even look at the company profile on OTC Markets, and sure as hell cannot be bothered to read corporate filings with OTC Markets or the state of Colorado. Then, they criticize me because I patiently attempt to explain to them that the corporate name is NOT DNAX!
That is very discouraging, and leads a person to question why they bother.
If people want to spend money while ill informed, go for it. Don't come bitching though when you lose everything.
However, if you want to rationally have ANY idea that your investment in tbis, or any, corporation is well advised, get off your lazy butts and do some research.
No... not gone. I just spent some time setting up some new network routers so I wasn't online much. Of course, if you all wanna wallow in your lack of facts, screw it. I can find something else to do with my time.
Believe it or not, I do have other things to do in my life besides yack on iHub. I had a pretty full day yesterday and when I looked at all of what was posted yesterday. I tbought, "Crap, I don't have the hours today it might take to respond to all of this mess."
Adrian didn't get $8 million, Mel and company did... and they only got stock, not cash.
As for any physical assets from DNA when Mel was in charge, you can figure that is all gone. I suppose it is possible that there could be a storage unit somewhere with physical assets inside... and I really don't see how ducktor could know that one does not exist... but I would not count on it.
As for previously existing "production equipment," DNA farmed their production out to a bottler so they did not have any specialized production equipment. They did used to have a forklift and a pallet truck or two for their warehouse (I saw pics of their warehouse), but they didn't need anything specialized to operate the warehouse.
It is starting to get rather old having to spoon feed people who cannot even open a PDF file on the Colorado Secretary of State's web site to learn something important. When no one else contributes information to the discussion, it stops being worthwhile for me to spend my time to engage in that discussion because I can learn everything that I share without sharing it. If others don't multiply the effort that put into research by doing their own research and sharing what they learn, how is this forum an appropriate use of my time? Most of the people on this forum don't even seem to know that DNAX is NOT the name of the corporation!
I have mentioned it several times, and no one seems to care enough to actually READ anything.
Adrian created Series G preferred stock when he took over the company. There are 2 million shares of Series G, and it has a stated face value of $4.00/share. It appears that Series G has been configured as if it is a loan, because the verbiage describes how it will be redeemed over several quarters, and it has an effective annual interest rate of 14%.
To me, it only makes sense that this is the instrument that Adrian used to pay off Mel and company when he bought DNA Brands, Inc.
Go read the document yourself if you don't like my interpretation.
I don't even know if she might have any interest in taking a shot at producing a beverage line for her own retail purposes.
At the same time, just how big is the client base of those who want a custom beverage recipe, and of tbose, how many have the funds to pay a beverage chemist like Parkside Beverage to develop a custom beverage?
I suspect that Cydney Whitmoyer spent alot of time tinkering with the DNA recipes to get them to taste so good. Who else would think so highly of the recipes to offer millions of dollars for the rights?
I have nothing concrete to offer here. I was just thinking to myself and thought I would share the thought because I thought it was an interesting thought.
Oh, and as far as just creating something similar to the DNA recipes to sell them herself, the chemists from Parkside Beverage are the people who absolutely have zero legal ground to stand upon regarding trying to claim that they did not infringe upon DNA's IP because the people at Parkside developed the recipes so they already know what the components of the recipes are. Almost the only way they could market similar energy drinks without a lawsuit is if they bought the rights to the DNA recipes first.
Yes, fine. Message received. You don't trust anything Adrian has to say. Fine... Adrian is a complete and total liar as far as you are concerned and is going to scam you for every subpenny he can extract from your pocket.
Now that we have that established, I guess there is nothing more to really talk about.
You are jumping down my throat when all I am doing is repeating what the man said less than a week ago. If you cannot even accept such basic "facts," then there really is no basis for a discussion with you.
I hope your flip of DNAX is successful for you.
To anyone else interested, here is what Adrian said about the money invested into the company:
The Q2 filing, which covers through the end of June, said the O/S is 7.33 billion.
Last Thursday, in the conference call, Adrian said the O/S is still 7.33 billion.
Neither one of those sources of information regarding the O/S are authoritative, meaning Adrian could be lying both times.
Only the TA is the authoritative source for the O/S. However, one must really ask oneself if you think Adrian would be that vocal about a lie that could get the stock halted by the SEC. Why would he risk that? No... I don't don't think it is reasonable to entertain that he was not truthful last Thursday when he stated that the O/S is still 7.33 billion.
Obviously, you are free to have your own opinion...
Just a thought. Adrian was very specific about the fact that the prospective buyer of the energy drink recipes is a private party, which makes it sound like a person provided the LOI, not a business.
What if that person was Cydney Whitmoyer, the owner of Parkside Beverage, who actually created all of the recipes for the energy drinks?
Note this is complete speculation. The only reason I thought about that was that on Facebook, she commented last May about how DNA energy drinks might make a comeback.
It is not much. I would just thinking about her statement, and what if Cydney Whitmoyer were to buy her creations from DNA Brands?
Adrian changed the A/S from 6 billion to 10 billion when he took over last February. However, he has only added 1.33 billion shares to the O/S since taking over the company.
I figure that if you are willing to offer him an unsecured loan for $700,000, then he could use that money to buy back 7 billion shares of stock. That would leave a quite respectable 330,000,000 share total in the O/S.
So, the issue is simple to modify the way that you would like. You just have to loan that $700,000 to Adrian. When should we expect you to call him with the good news?
When Adrian took over the company last February, he created 355,000 shares of Series F preferred stock. Each share of Series F is worth 35,000 shares of DNAX common stock. That is what he uses to retain control of the company. Those shares are equivalent in voting power to 12.4 billion shares of DNAX.
In last week's conference call, Adrian stated that he does not own any shares of DNAX common stock.
When Adrian took over the business last February, he also created $8 million worth of Series G preferred stock. It is very likely that this is what he used as payment to Mel and company to buy out their interest in the corporation.
You can learn about these preferred stock issuances by looking at the filings used to modify the corporate Articles of Incorporation of the Colorado Secretary of State's web site.
For some reason, people seem confused about how things would work if Adrian executed the LOI option.
So, I will try to explain...
1) You own shares of DNAX stock, which is the ticker symbol for the common stock of the DNA Brands, Inc. corporation.
2) Adrian would sell the energy drink intellectual property to a private party. That means that the private party would own the energy drink recipes, and DNA Brands, Inc. would no longer ever have the right to use the recipes to produce any of the energy drinks.
In return, DNA Brands, Inc. would receive some amount of cash. Adrian has only characterized it as multiple millions.
Your stock holdings would remain unchanged.
If the market perceived that the amount of cash which DNA Brands, Inc. received in exchange for the energy drink intellectual property increased the value of the company, the PPS could increase as a result.
If not, the PPS would not go any lower because $0.0001 is as low as it can go.
3) Adrian may use some of the cash to pay some existing debts.
4) Adrian would use some of the cash to purchase one or more existing businesses which have existing products and revenue. Because we are talking about a cash purchase instead of a huge stock transfer to the acquisition target(s), Adrian would retain control of DNA Brands, Inc.
Your shares of DNAX would not change. Because DNA Brands, Inc. would completely own the other businesses, Adrian would have control of those businesses, and there would be no reverse splits of DNAX common stock without Adrian's approval. As you know, Adrian has been pretty specific that he is not going to do a reverse split.
Once the sale of the other business(s) is complete, the market might perceive an increased value for the DNA Brands, Inc. corporation due to the added value its ownersbip of one or more operational businesses with an existing revenue stream.
Several people on this forum found lots of additional information on Adrian last February. If you desire, you could probably look through posts done the day of Adrian's first PR and a few days immediately after to find more about him.
Or, there is this thing called the Internet which I understand is an amazingly useful tool for searching for information.
If you do perform your own searches, our Adrian is NOT the one that went to school at CUNY in New York. Our Adrian went to school in Canada.
August is still third quarter. Until the fourth quarter is over, we cannot say that Adrian will not hit the fourth quarter milestone. If we take him at his word, it is pretty obvious he has not yet decided what he will do.
Oh... and you can obviously choose your own first strike, but for me, strike 1 was when Adrian failed to hit the production milestone of "early 3rd quarter." That means for me, if we get to January with no energy drinks back in retail, and no other business that promises the possibility of profit, that would a second strike from my point of view.
Yeah... I aced economics class in high school decades ago and have since operated my own business several times.
My point is that if Adrian unloads the energy drink intellectual property and then uses the cash to purchase a different business that is not already producing a profit before Adrian purchases it, then he has screwed up, and that would be strike 2.
My earlier statement allows for acknowledgement that for a brief period of time (maybe a quarter or two), there could be some acquisition expenses that zero out profits for that short period. However, DNA already has a unprofitable business now. Selling this one to buy another unprofitable business would be real stupid.
I expect Adrian to be smarter than that. Time will tell...
I count Adrian with one strike for missing the "early third quarter" milestone.
I only see two ways for him to miss a second strike, and that is either hit the fourth quarter milestone, or else execute a plan B that gives promise of profit before the end of the year.
There are four and a half months to the end of the year. We will see what happens...