Decision Diagnostics Corp (DECN)

[EDMGUY]

loan you asked:

If you followed the post you would understand that some of the inventory that was purchased and/or manufactured in Q2 was declared obsolete in Q2.
I don't need to call the company to know that that is VERY strange. I can't imagine a good explanation for it. Can you?

This may help (or not it's a little long) but here goes:
I have been a precision machinist in the tool & die/mold making trade for almost 40 years. One of my previous shops made precision stamping dies. Some tools we built and sold/shipped directly to the customers and others we kept in house and also ran the product for the customer. Many companies are only interested in selling their products, not running a stamping operation of their own. One of the tools we did build and run product was a medical test strip very similar to JNJ/DECN's strips (virtually all of them are stamped products). Because of the multi-layered/laminated construction of these strips the process is very difficult to get to work well. Each separate layer of material (with adhesive on them) must be fed into the press at near perfect alignment with each other so that when they are stamped out all of the flow channels and analysis features work. If the registration is off the strips will not function properly,if at all. Because of the high speed of the press (200-300 strokes per minute/multiple parts per stroke) our press used an optical scanner which constantly monitored registration marks printed on each layer and could adjust them on the fly. Even with that you still must do extensive QA/testing before releasing the product to the customer for sales. You seem to be pretty savvy regarding costs/profits etc..
As you can probably imagine when you have inventory of hundreds or even thousands of parts accumulating per minute when things go wrong they go really wrong real fast. There has been some comments made here about where did all that money go. A single press and tool to produce a part like these strips can easily be $750k to 1Million. Can you get them built overseas cheaper? absolutely (think Shasta maybe) but do they run well? almost universally not. There's a reason most large mulinationals have their high end equipment built in U.S. or Western Europe and then send them overseas for production.

Sorry for being so long winded on this one (you still awake ;) but I am passionate about my work and seemed like a time I could contribute on something I have some experience in.
Regards