I gave the kiss of death to Nortel which went into administration this week. I bought shares in the company.
I bought shares in Atmel shortly before they kicked out George Perlegos who I always thought was a great semiconductor CEO. Since I bought in, the Atmel share price has declined by over 50 per cent.
I bought shares in Filtronic, assuming that any company led by a man with such a massive brain as Professor David Rhodes could not fail to do well. Since then the shares have slumped to less than a fifth of their value.
I bought Bookham thinking Andrew Rickman was going to be the British Gordon
But when I look at the banks' analysts and stockbrokers' analysts with their super-brains, cold eyes, thin lips, humourless demeanour and questions of mind-numbingly detailed tedium, I realise that share spotting might best be left to them.
My dear David,
Whilst I appreciated your honesty and self-disclosure, doesn't it rather indict you as a reputable source of information and opinions? I mean, if you can't spot bad management (whether its financial, product, strategy, or whatever), then are your viewpoints reliable?
FYI, there are a lot of semiconductor companies with relatively good products that are suffering right now. I think Engineering has done its job, but perhap it is finance, marketing, strategy, and leadership that has let them down?
Cheers,
Alan in Austin
P.S: Oh, the carnage going on in Austin is just amazing. Spansion, Freescale, AMD, AMCC, IBM - the list of companies with good products laying off workers faster than you can say "Jack Russell" is painful and ugly.
Alan, I'd hate to think I purveyed dodgy information. Opinions are another thing. To my mind their value is not whether they are right or wrong, but whether they stimulate debate. No one is right all the time, and I'm not in the slightest bit ashamed of sometimes being wrong in my opinions especially about the semiconductor industry. Anyone who says, or worse thinks, they are right all the time in this industry is either a bullshitter or a nutter. Very sorry to hear about the situation in Austin. The only consolation is that when the big UK companies fell apart it engendered a lot of start-ups.