A few updates on Energous happenings from the last week or so. First up, Chris Brown of Aristides Capital gave a presentation at a conference, "Kase Learning: The Art, Pain and Opportunity of Short Selling".
It is the best presentation covering everything that is wrong about Energous I have seen, and neatly summarizes a bunch of what I have been saying in this blog, in a way a lay person can understand. According to their SeekingAlpha page, Aristides Capital manage about $83 million in investments. Here are the "Take Home Messages" from this 34 page work of art:
"The people who do publicity and media relations for Energous have done an utterly brilliant job selling vaporware. Congratulations, Ajit Pai and others.
The “advance” upon which Energous was founded, “the pocket of RF energy,” is a fabrication, a “dazzle them with BS” way of saying “constructive interference,” and doesn’t solve any issues. The reasons we don’t transmit large amounts of RF through the air for power—safety limitations, equipment cost and size, and poor efficiency—are the same as they have been for decades.
Energous is a fraud, one which is burning a lot of cash and will run out of money. The company has no chance of making a commercially successful product. We expect the stock will go to $0."
A link to the full presentation is here.
I added the bold above as I'm glad to see more people covering the what I said in my second post on this blog, over two years ago: "In theory, it can be done in limited cases, but in practice cost and efficiency issues will likely render it impractical."
So many of the individual pages of this presentation cover topics I have often spent hundreds of words to try to get across in posts, so it's a lesson for me in how to be succinct and effective in this area. I won't repeat them all but a few memorable quotes:
Energous Corporation: a worthless equity hyped to $500 million
CEO who lies bigly and often
#FAKENEWS – false & unskeptical media coverage
If you tell the same big lie often enough, many people will believe it
and my personal favorite as an engineer:
Very small numbers add together to make other very small numbers
CNBC covered this and asked the company for a response:
"Energous did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
Download the presentation and read it for yourself, I'm not doing it justice here.
Speaking of "Unskeptical Media Coverage"
There was also a new wireless power article "When will your phone charge wirelessly in your pocket? We asked an expert" on Digital Trends. It focused on Energous and Ossia, with a brief mention of Powercast, so was aimed squarely at the RF at-distance wireless charging market. I was interested to see the analysis from independent experts and a balanced and reasonable piece on the practical issues surrounding this tech. You're going to be amazed by who the experts are:
It is the best presentation covering everything that is wrong about Energous I have seen, and neatly summarizes a bunch of what I have been saying in this blog, in a way a lay person can understand. According to their SeekingAlpha page, Aristides Capital manage about $83 million in investments. Here are the "Take Home Messages" from this 34 page work of art:
"The people who do publicity and media relations for Energous have done an utterly brilliant job selling vaporware. Congratulations, Ajit Pai and others.
The “advance” upon which Energous was founded, “the pocket of RF energy,” is a fabrication, a “dazzle them with BS” way of saying “constructive interference,” and doesn’t solve any issues. The reasons we don’t transmit large amounts of RF through the air for power—safety limitations, equipment cost and size, and poor efficiency—are the same as they have been for decades.
Energous is a fraud, one which is burning a lot of cash and will run out of money. The company has no chance of making a commercially successful product. We expect the stock will go to $0."
A link to the full presentation is here.
I added the bold above as I'm glad to see more people covering the what I said in my second post on this blog, over two years ago: "In theory, it can be done in limited cases, but in practice cost and efficiency issues will likely render it impractical."
So many of the individual pages of this presentation cover topics I have often spent hundreds of words to try to get across in posts, so it's a lesson for me in how to be succinct and effective in this area. I won't repeat them all but a few memorable quotes:
Energous Corporation: a worthless equity hyped to $500 million
CEO who lies bigly and often
#FAKENEWS – false & unskeptical media coverage
If you tell the same big lie often enough, many people will believe it
and my personal favorite as an engineer:
Very small numbers add together to make other very small numbers
CNBC covered this and asked the company for a response:
"Energous did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
Download the presentation and read it for yourself, I'm not doing it justice here.
Speaking of "Unskeptical Media Coverage"
There was also a new wireless power article "When will your phone charge wirelessly in your pocket? We asked an expert" on Digital Trends. It focused on Energous and Ossia, with a brief mention of Powercast, so was aimed squarely at the RF at-distance wireless charging market. I was interested to see the analysis from independent experts and a balanced and reasonable piece on the practical issues surrounding this tech. You're going to be amazed by who the experts are:
- Hatam Zeine - Founder and CTO of Ossia
- Gordon Bell - VP Marketing of Energous
- Mark Hopgood - Snr Director Marketing/Strategy at Dialog Semiconductor (Energous Partner/Investor)
aaaaaand that's it. Every single person interviewed has a financial incentive to promote this technology, they are completely biased. Not even a token attempt here to speak to a university professor of electrical engineering, or get a counter viewpoint. Spend a few minutes Googling Energous and you'll find plenty of stories out there on the less savory side of at least Energous. Of course I'm pretty biased since I'm one of those drawing attention to that. Is this a puff piece that's essentially PR for the companies, or is it actually an attempt to inform the reader? If the former, it achieved that goal splendidly, if it's the latter then it's a major fail.
Now I've been harsh on tech journalists covering this topic in the past, and while it's not the ass-kiss fest that David Pogue exemplifies, or the embarrassingly weak coverage from Tom's Guide where they got the wool pulled over their eyes on what they were showing, this is still another company PR piece masquerading as tech journalism. I'm not sure the author even realizes he's being used by these companies to whitewash their PR and give it a veneer of authenticity.
I was about to take apart the rest of the article, but in the end realized it's just more of the same of what I've written on other journalists. Instead I'll just make this one point - whenever I talk to journalists about Energous, I'm either asked if I have a financial interest or conflict of interest. When I post online I always get someone replying that I'm just a short-seller looking to make money, or am upset I'm losing money shorting the stock despite my repeated statements that I have no position on the company - I even had someone who owns a wireless power company demand that I declare my financial interests because I was, unlike him, clearly biased. Why do I get more scrutiny about my motivations than someone who is doing it for the money? Only answer I can think of - when someone isn't doing something for money, it confuses people. The idea that you're doing it simply "because it's the right thing to do" is utterly alien and therefore suspicious.
Energous' Financials
It was also time for Energous' quarterly financial results, and once again there were no surprises here - it's still a ~$500m company with $25,000 in quarterly services revenue and no sales. With cash in the bank and the current burn rate, they have 9, at best 12, months of operation left before further fundraising is needed. All talk of product delivery and profitability was once again pushed out into the future, as seems to happen every time. By their own admission, they can't get to revenue before they run out of money, let alone to enough sales to break even. No mention of Myant dropping WattUp from their Skiin product, you'd think given the big deal they made of that product announcement a few months ago that it would be important for investors to be told about that. A transcript of the earnings call can be found here. Oh, and they're also awarding themselves millions of dollars in equity because they're doing such a fantastic job.
I was about to take apart the rest of the article, but in the end realized it's just more of the same of what I've written on other journalists. Instead I'll just make this one point - whenever I talk to journalists about Energous, I'm either asked if I have a financial interest or conflict of interest. When I post online I always get someone replying that I'm just a short-seller looking to make money, or am upset I'm losing money shorting the stock despite my repeated statements that I have no position on the company - I even had someone who owns a wireless power company demand that I declare my financial interests because I was, unlike him, clearly biased. Why do I get more scrutiny about my motivations than someone who is doing it for the money? Only answer I can think of - when someone isn't doing something for money, it confuses people. The idea that you're doing it simply "because it's the right thing to do" is utterly alien and therefore suspicious.
Energous' Financials
It was also time for Energous' quarterly financial results, and once again there were no surprises here - it's still a ~$500m company with $25,000 in quarterly services revenue and no sales. With cash in the bank and the current burn rate, they have 9, at best 12, months of operation left before further fundraising is needed. All talk of product delivery and profitability was once again pushed out into the future, as seems to happen every time. By their own admission, they can't get to revenue before they run out of money, let alone to enough sales to break even. No mention of Myant dropping WattUp from their Skiin product, you'd think given the big deal they made of that product announcement a few months ago that it would be important for investors to be told about that. A transcript of the earnings call can be found here. Oh, and they're also awarding themselves millions of dollars in equity because they're doing such a fantastic job.
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