e.Digital is accountable - they are the ones who created inflated expectations by including a link that does not even have a direct quote from O'Leary. It was supposedly paraphrasing another article which no one seems to have posted.
What was that doing in a PR from e.Digital? Had e.Digital been given firm information from Wencor to expect a further order from them to supply additional units to Ryan Air? Or, were they just doing employing their usual embellishment and innuendo. Certainly the revenue guidance given in that PR was written to be intentionally misleading. It seems the Ryan Air hype was as well.
Note that APS/Wencor never hyped the Ryan Air test. In fact, I'm not sure that they have ever issued a press release about it or mentioned it in any public communications. Perhaps they knew it was not a sure thing.
e.Digital has a long history of making public announcements that should come from their customers. Lanier, Maycom, Eastech, Hango/RS, Evolution, Eclipse and APS are all examples. e.Digital even issued a PR about Eclipse taking pre-orders for the HD 1213 at CES 2004. They weren't taking orders on any products at the booth.
The airlines are APS's customers, not e.Digital's, so why is e.Digital making announcements about APS's customers anyway? e.Digital should only make announcements about firm orders they get from their customers.
Sadly, the agoracom group had already been adding up the millions of dollars e.Digital would get from 6,000 units. When they raise expectations as they always do, they just let the believers down. Certainly they know that some of the faithful buy shares based upon their false hype.
Lastly, the article linked to was rather bizarre and suspicious when one considers that most airlines want to use IFE as a competitive advantage. What was this all about?
"... Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is urging his low-fare competitors to get into IFE as soon as they can, so encouraging were the results from the first month of the Irish carrier’s trial of the sturdy little device from Seattle-based APS."
AI
