SCKT...my visit to the company at the Shareholder's Meeting:
I will start off by saying I was very impressed with the operations that are occurring at Socket Mobile. They are located in Newark, CA in a small industrial/warehouse area of the town. It's a good neighborhood (Apple has a small facility in the area), but the building was simple and the layout of their offices and cubicles was nice but not too extravagant.
I saw the whole series of barcode scanners that are being offered and the Somo products and accessories. There is no doubt that a lot of thought went into the design of the scanners. They look good. Aesthetics may not mean much to some people, but in retail it is important. There is no question the scanners look appropriate next to an iPad tablet (vs say the black Lego cube like product of Motorola).
I talked to the CEO, CFO, and two of the technical executives. I was very impressed with the direction they plan on taking the company. The company has some very sharp individuals with great ideas. They wouldn't give great detail on the next series of new products they have coming, but from what I know about the industry, the area they are targeting could generate revenue equivalent to what the cordless scanner division is doing. It was obvious they are very excited about what the technical team has come up with and feel very good about it. The new products will be tied to the software development kit.
Imo, the SDK is still the key product for Socket, not just for the scanners, but for the Somo now too. It's the driver to get partners. I've said it before and I'll say it again----this SDK is how they can beat companies like Motorola and Honeywell in the long run. Once the developer has spent the money integrating the Socket software code into their own programming code, it'd be very hard for the competition to come in and get it switched. Motorola may be able to muscle distributors and final large customers, but if the software is already written to use Socket's scanners exclusively, Motorola is shut out. You capture the developer, you capture market share that will be very very hard to have stolen away later.
A few things on the Shareholder's Proxy..... a group of minority shareholder's that I know (and am part of) banded together to put a new representative on the Board (other than management's choices). He's an extremely intelligent individual with a very strong marketing and sales resume. He also owns enough shares (that he's underwater on) that he comes at it from the perspective of frustrated long term shareholders. I think he will be a real benefit to the company and shareholders going forward. I'm not sure the company appreciated our actions, but as shareholders we have the right to do it and I think it will reward everyone in the end.
The second thing is Proposal #5: Authorize outstanding shares going from 10M to 20M. Right now, fully diluted (with all options and warrants) there are 7.7M shares outstanding. They wanted to increase the number of additional shares to 20M, not because of some immediate need, but for future use for when (as they fully expect) things become very successful going forward. The example I was given was a merger at $10 that could take them to a new level. I didn't vote for it, but it still passed easily. I'm not overly concerned by it. The company has no intention of diluting out the executives anymore or the employees and so I'm not worried about them hurting shareholders with this proposal. In the end, it will probably be beneficial as things play out and growth occurs.
If there is one thing I took away from meeting them all is that this company fully expects to take complete advantage of the lead they have in mobile applications/barcode use and drive it forward at full speed. Any doubt on my opinion of them was put to rest. They still have hurdles to get over (balance sheet and waiting for the partners, 500+ scanner developers now and 50+ Somo, to send business their way) but the future could be pretty amazing. As long as they continue to keep expenses down, even if the future is only "reasonably good", they will still become nicely profitable and the stock price will do very well in the next year.
I have more specific info I can pass along (I'd rather do it privately). Contact me if you'd like it.
