Westinsider, I think you are right. The company has formed distribution arrangements with 6 different entities since the product was developed; no commercial sales. The S. Americans had a warrant whereby they could buy more shares at about $0.026 per share and they apparently passed. The lack of performance breeds suspicion about the company’s performance claims. The company needs to ditch these supposed distributors and align with someone who can get the job done (who may also proved better funding than that recently disclosed) and also be wholly transparent with testing information.
Esposito has a sales background, as do Dodd and Dinges. Executives can talk about any variety of opportunities and pipeline, but they need to start making some sales. The company only has a handful of units to sell at this time. Recognizing the first buyers are going to buy a few machines to ‘kick the tires’, management needs to have a plan to leverage these early adopter purchases. The lack of inventory will impact cash-flows and equity line draw requirements.
The company needs some accomplishments. The recent funding may have taken some pressure off, but the reality is that it doesn’t provide much in the way of resources until the S-1 becomes effective (30 days out to a few months out depending on the degree of SEC comment).
When the company begins to do site testing to satisfy the FDA (which I think would have been a no-brainer request by the FDA that MZEI should have been prepared for - the longer it takes the company to get testing started, presuming it hasn’t, the more it looks as if the company was unprepared and grossly misread the position of the FDA), it could very well go into some depth about the testing so as to give shareholders and even potential customers confidence that they are on a solid path to regulatory approval. Will they provide a detailed explanation of the testing, or a PR that simply says testing has started at XYZ location, or will they say nothing and wait for some results? The longer the share price remains low, the more costly (dilutive) will be the draws on the equity line when the S-1 is approved. The low share price is due to no sales, lack of confidence in management (hasn’t been earned yet), lack of understanding of the plan and eventual valuation, and lack of vision for how management intends to execute its plan over a given period of time.
Further, as others have stated, AscepticSure remains a secret. Nobody knows about it. The website sucks. There is no effective market awareness campaign in the US, in Europe, anywhere. The investor relations position is in material need of upgrade. Etc. etc. How much of this is recognized and is being worked on, how much is hanging fire pending the S-1 registration approval, and how much isn’t even recognized? If someone calls in or is contacted, the company needs to know how many machines they need, how they will be used (protocol), what the cost:benefit ROI is, what is the training, what is the service agreement, etc. etc. The sales pitch has to move past ‘we have the technology to kill bugs’, don’t you know?
We’ve got 5 guys leading various aspects of this company and none of them share office space. At the basic level, it doesn’t look like a business, to say nothing about gaining employee synergies derived from proximity. The company obviously recognized this, but nonetheless didn’t require relocation in the signed employment agreements.
These are the same issues that have existed for years…. just with some different people in the MZEI seats. These guys have a lot of work to do.
