Pareteum Corporation (fka TEUM)

[mrdecember123]

from the "other" board-----And Another Negative Article
https://viceroyresearch.org/2019/06/26/pareteum-the-wild-west-of-telecoms/

Pareteum (NASDAQ:TEUM) provides services to Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), who sell data/minutes to users and purchase data/minutes from telecom network operators. Recently Pareteum has been subject to criticism from other short sellers. Given the discourse, Viceroy believe it is prudent that we also share our findings.
Further to recent research reports, Pareteum has a history of promotional press releases of customer wins. A deeper investigation into these customers show much larger number are insignificant, and the companies behind them appear in no way capable of fulfilling the contract values advertised by Pareteum.
Two of Pareteum’s customer wins appear to be undisclosed related parties tied to Pareteum consultant Dinesh “Danny” Patel.
One of Pareteum’s announced customer wins is a company under a historic investigation and charged with significant VAT evasion fraud. Information on this is easily available, leading us to believe that Pareteum was aware of the company’s issues while announcing the customer win.
Pareteum appears to be in breach of US sanctions against Iran through its provision of services to Iranian MVNO Amin SMC. Amin SMC appears to be chaired by Hamid Reza Amirinia, an individual suspected of breaching sanctions with an Iranian government mandate to launder money for the regime.
Several entities on the pareteum.cloud domain are small companies or have no web presence whatsoever, leading us to believe that they are Pareteum customers who are unable to pay or have no operations.
Pareteum’s 36-month contractual backlog measurement is not an accurate predictor of future profits. An analysis of the company’s backlog and management comments shows it should have reported 73.10% more revenue in Q1 2019 than it did. Management appears to be inflating this figure to hype up the share price and reassure investors.
Pareteum’s management has a history of dishonest reporting. Notably, CFO Ted O’Donnell who was sued by former employer AudioEye for fabricating US$8.1m worth of revenue over 3 quarters which was found to have no supporting documentation. This was an overstatement of revenues in the period of more than 3,000%.
Pareteum’s rapid-fire announcement of customer wins mirrors its announcements regarding cryptocurrency in 2017, which were put to an abrupt halt when a response to an SEC letter revealed TEUM had made no revenue, nor planned to do so, from cryptocurrency.
Pareteum has made an US$3.7m loan to Yonder Media Mobile, an early stage MVNO operated by serial failure entrepreneur Adam Kidron. Kidron has burned at least US$100m in his enterprises, having already cratered the Yonder brand with a music streaming service which collapsed in 2017.
A breakdown of Pareteum’s revenues, cash flows and receivables show the majority of its revenue from sources other than Vodafone and acquired businesses iPass and Artilium appears to be uncollectable. Accordingly, we believe total revenue is overstated by 42%, corroborating our findings regarding Pareteum’s customers.
We are as yet unable to quantify the impact of the company’s apparent breach of sanctions against Iran and have not assigned a discount. We have reported this apparent breach to the relevant federal authorities.

A token valuation on an EV/Revenue basis presents a 44% – 76% downside for Pareteum’s share price (State Current Price), with the more severe scenario more probable. However, based on the numerous subjective issues highlighted in this report and the dependence of the valuation on our already-conservative revenue adjustment, we cannot fully quantify the downside, which we believe to be significant.