What a bum note: Violin's shares perform financial diminuendo Violin Memory's stock price has plummeted to $1.30 from its IPO level of $7.51 on October 4, 2013. That's an 82.7 per cent fall in 25 months. CEO Don Basile was axed in mid-December 2013 after the stock had fallen to $2.69; he was ousted as a result of the disastrous post-IPO business performance. Violin_Memory_stock_price …
It's a shame that Violin really seemed to misjudge the market. They had an excellent play for super low-latency applications, but it turns out that market isn't that big, and their initial pricing was way too high for people who didn't need the bleeding-edge performance. Their prices have come down now, but Flash storage has come down generally, so Violin is maybe at parity with other players but without any special sauce to distinguish them, arguably apart from performance. On the flip side, you can get better performance now from other vendors than used to be possible, vendors who seem to be less obviously doomed.
I wouldn't say they are doomed. Anyone with half a brain knew their market was tiny before they IPO'd but unfortunately there was money to be made.
All they need to do is adjust expectations - there will be no growth, there will be consistently great products within the limited realm of ultra performance. The company can easily continue selling what they have to their market for years to come as long as the expectation of growth goes away. Unfortunately the stock market doesn't work like that which is why good companies need to stay private where profit is king and revenue/growth is irrelevant.
..Tim Worstall back to explain to me how initial share prices are worked out in the first place. Never did understand that, although I have a nasty feeling that it's another case, along with so much else, apparently, to do with the stock market, of 'wishful thinking'.
@David Roberts - Yeah, I was thinking that too, but how do we get the Spice Girls into the paella? Poik!
I think HP would take a punt at this if they can get it for under $200M, just for the patents and hardware IP as a stop gap till they have their own NVMe/DSSD type solution.
It could act as a high performance/low latency tier for the 3Par arrays without having to do too much re-engineering.
Otherwise, there will be a fire sale by the middle to end of 2016 on strings, tunning pegs, and chin rests.
Wrong, the IP is not worth $50mil and HP is not going to buy a bad business competing against 20+ companies in this space now. Violin had a chance when they were the only game in town, or one of them. Now, they are lost in a sea of competition.
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