Hear AtLast Holdings Inc (HRAL)

[Tcharles]

Hear At Last, the retail chain, is owned and operated by Pharmacy Hearing Centers (PHC), which in turn is owned by VitaSound. This is a privately held company. The president is Gora Ganguli and the board chair is Mark Chamberlain of Trivaris.

Hear At Last Holdings Inc (aka HRAL) is a separate, publicly traded company. It used to own the retain chain, but sold it to PHC in 2010. Today it only collects a percentage of sales from PHC as an earn out from the sale. The president of this firm is Matthew Sacco. Ganguli sits on the board of HRAL. It is unclear what HRAL Holdings does other than collect fees from PHC, and publish the odd filings once in a while.

As for Appletree and sales for this year, this is difficult to predict. We do know from filings that Canadian sales in 2013 were down 45% over the same period in 2012. We also know that Vitasound-PHC failed to raise the $5M+ they needed for retail expansion. This would suggest they are cash strapped, in bootstrapping mode once again, and can only only achieve 20-30% of their expansion objectives. Taken all together, I am guessing they will achieve some (below forecast) top-line growth due to the new stores, along with much higher bottom line losses because those stores haven't become fully operational yet.

My view is that this company (or group of them) desperately needs growth capital and without it will be stuck in the land of the walking dead.