Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Ultrasonic AG Update

I've blogged once or twice in the past two weeks.  Ultrasonic is a German-Chinese sports shoe company.  It was a company on the German S-DAX and riding along at 6.5 Euro roughly a couple of weeks ago.  Then, the CEO/COO disappears over a weekend....price of the stock drops in a dramatic fashion....and seven days later, the CEO reappears trying to comfort everyone.

The pricing of the stock today is around 2.14....better than the 1.6 pricing from two weeks ago.

The latest that I can find over this German-Chinese company is that the owner kinda admits that he used some part of the sixty-million for a company project (from a Hong Kong bank) for a personal project.  He says....he intended to repay the loan.  Based on commentary from the various business journals.....most are leaving the story at that point.  They can't really put anything together on the guy, his need for the loan, his need to "disappear", or what this whole thing was really about.

For the financial market folks who control your participation in the DAX?  Well....they avoid discussing such things in public but you would imagine that there's some questions out there and no answers.  Ultrasonic might be able to survive and continue on within the S-DAX (the fact that it hasn't slipped back down below two Euro in the last week suggests that).

The curious thing about this whole deal is that Ultrasonic has a fair market in Germany (also in China) and was showing enough profit and sustainability to generate the sixty-million in the form of a loan for expansion.  On paper, they say every year since 2011....they've shown growth on sales and profits.  One might ask if this was true info on the sales and profits, and maybe that's part of the bigger problem here.

Ultrasonic AG's fate?  They made a sports shoe product of a style that Germans wanted, and I suspect there's still a market trend for them.  If they made stupid financial decisions and lost money on production and sales.....that's an entirely different topic.  If their boss just dissolved some profits to disappear occasionally or did sloppy handling of money......that's an entirely different topic.  Maybe Ultrasonic AG simply gets bought up by some other competitor, renamed and relaunched.

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