WANdisco suspends shares pending fraud investigation WANdisco has suspended trading on the AIM, the sub-market of the London Stock Exchange, following its discovery of "potentially fraudulent irregularities" in reporting its sales. The company said the potential irregularities arose in relation to received purchase orders and related revenue and bookings as represented by "one …
The Yorkshire Post has just created a new role of Science and Technology Editor, funded largely by, er, WANdisco: https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2023/news/new-job-created-as-daily-invests-in-science-and-technology-coverage/
I wonder if this reporter will be covering this story with rigour and impartiality...
So reporting sales of $24 million instead of $9 million is considered to be an "irregularity" now is it? I can think of a few more appropriate words to describe that.
The company website contains a few other unfortunate gems, such as "Leverage all your data for greater business insight and take advantage of advanced analytics". If only they'd leveraged all their own data a bit more, perhaps the insight into their own business might have caught this a bit sooner.
No it what happens when you include “forecasted” sales in you profit projection handouts to the market…
So what probably happened was a salesperson talked up both the size and odds of achieving their target within a particular period, these figures would then have fed into overall sales forecasts with an unwarrranted level of certainty. Obviously, at some point events would require the opportunity to be reassessed.
When I was in sales we only communicated upwards details of business we had a high certainty of closing (ie. The next step was contract negotiation), resulting in the team always over achieving. Also it mostly didn’t bother us if customer circumstances changed and something got slipped to the next financial year - as this would give us a high certainty deal for that year!
This allowed for intelligent growth rather than the “ must achieve 10% more than last year” mindset which clouds judgement.
This seems to happen an awful lot with these companies based out of northern England - WANdisco are based mostly out of Sheffield. It seems to be a factor of a regional media that is terrified to be accused of "doing the region down" and doesn't have the resources to actually look into these companies so instead simply prints gushing prose about how they're helping the region grow, etc etc. It generally takes an investigation by national media to discover that all is not as it seems, see also the UKFast disgrace
M247 are most likely next
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