In case anyone missed this...
High-flying Rambus shares sold
STOCK PRICE UP 160% THIS YEAR
By Jack Davis Mon, Apr. 10, 2006
Mercury News
David Mooring, a former president of Rambus and a current member of its board, pulled in $14.7 million in February and March by exercising options to buy and then sell the company's stock. In January he took in $8.5 million.
Rambus has initiated and defended lawsuits contending it owns inventions used in memory chips that store data in products such as computers and cell phones. Its six-year patent fight with memory chip makers is now being heard in a San Jose courtroom in a case against Hynix Semiconductor.
Mooring's transactions were made according to a trading plan he set up in November, two weeks after a federal judge in Virginia dismissed a lawsuit by Samsung Electronics over four Rambus patents, allowing Rambus to focus its legal strategy on cases in California.
Rambus shares are on fire this year, having risen more than 160 percent since the end of 2005. They touched a 52-week high of $42.90 Friday before closing at $42.41.
Mooring, a graduate of Cupertino High School and Santa Clara University, spent $18.4 million exercising options allowing him to buy 1.2 million shares at prices ranging from $4.86 to $15.67, and then sold 87 percent of the shares for $33.1 million at prices ranging from $30 to $33.64 each.
Rambus stock was the subject of a recent Heard On The Street column in the Wall Street Journal, which raised questions about its valuation. The company may receive hundreds of millions in legal settlements, which would be a nice addition to the company's balance sheet but skew its bottom line with a temporary boost.
The intended effect of its litigation efforts, which represented one-quarter of its operating expenses last year, would be new royalty revenue streams. In January, Sunnyvale chip maker Advanced Micro Devices said it would buy licenses from Rambus.
Among the 150 largest public companies in Silicon Valley, Rambus has the highest market-value-to-sales ratio, according to a Mercury News special report elsewhere in today's paper. Rambus ended Friday valued at $4.34 billion, 27 times its 2005 sales. That was almost nine times higher than the average valuation of the SV150 at the end of the first quarter.
RESIGNATIONS: In other Rambus news last month, the company's board of directors elected a new member only to have him resign before the month was over. Mark Pinto resigned two weeks after joining the board, citing conflicts with his job as a senior vice president at Applied Materials that weren't originally foreseen when Pinto was named, according to a company statement.
The company also lost its chief financial officer at the beginning of March. In February the company said in a statement that Robert Eulau, who joined Rambus from Hewlett-Packard in 2001, was quitting to ``pursue another opportunity.''
Since the beginning of the year Eulau made about $7 million exercising options to buy roughly 400,000 Rambus shares and then selling most of them, according to Thomson Financial. He left the company owning about 72,000 shares.
