(Just posted this over at Yahoo...)
Was gone much of the day... and i come back to this news. Very disappointing-- what some folks kept touting as the "seasonality" obviously wasn't here, at least not this quarter. Frankly, i was never convinced of the seasonality argument, which is why i never argued it here, but preferred to look at the "bigger picture" for longer term prospects.
On the positive side, JADA actually would have made just slightly over $1M in net income and tallied an EPS of 0.0127, rather similar to Q2, except for that bad debt consideration.
And so looking forward: obviously the big retail shareholders amongst us (including myself) need not panic sell, b/c we'd only tank the shareprice and get very little for our shares. So, like Sameer and Oracle and others, i'm holding to see what the longer term brings.
I'm still very intrigued and actually enthused by all this branding of SheTai jade that is occurring in China, with more and more websites (as we've recently seen).
I continue to be intrigued by the possibility that some "critical mass" of awareness of SheTai jade is developing and that one day JADA may start to get some gigantic orders for this stuff, which has such interesting properties for artistic and architectural design (not to mention jewelry)....
And so, rather than a quick spike up, like JADA enjoyed a few times over the last 13 months, we're going to have some months of drifting around on the shareprice.... unless/until some major good news is announced, like an acquisition or whatever.
This will be a major lesson in patience for those of us longs who still hold, believing that there is still a significant "story" to the business model and the prospects that mgmt have outlined, in the larger context of Zhang Guoxi and his business empire and their evident intention to create massive awareness of SheTai jade throughout China and beyond.
I know it's hard to be optimistic after two straight qrtrs of negligible EPS... But i don't think unmitigated pessimism is called for, either.
We can recall that the cash-burn rate for JADA is so low that, as Controller once posted on this [Yahoo] board, the co. could go for 4 years without selling ANY jade whatsoever and still remain quite solvent without needing to take on debt or dilute shareholders.
So let's see what JADA might still be able to deliver in the medium-term or long-term future. I actually do remain an optimist, though not a naive one, and i'm open to the possibility that down the road we may not see JADA's hopes come true to the degree that we might wish....
But, as with all investments, one has to be able to accept that risk. The good news is that, with all the cash, JADA's not going anywhere near zero. Short of an acquisition, they could always just take a major investment position in some other very profitable, fast-growing biz and double or triple their money!