The short arguments exposed

[admin]

You will see people posting stuff on message boards or even the comment section of our Seeking Alpha articles, trying to scare you out of your shares. So far, we haven't seen much that should give investors things to worry about.

For instance, they have argued that the auditor has, in the latest 10-K (the 2018 year-end report), expressed that the company has shortcomings in its control systems. Here is why that is less worrying than might seem at first sight:

1. This is a small, fast-growing company absorbing two acquisitions, some organizational shortcomings for such companies are not all that uncommon.
   
2. What the critics/(shorters?) conveniently left out was that the audit did specifically stated that these shortcomings haven't affected the financial figures. That is, the auditors are vouching for these, including those backlog figures..
   
3. What the critics conveniently left out is that the company reported extensive measures to shore up their control systems in the same 10-K.
   

Here is what the auditors said about the finances:

In our opinion, the consolidated financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2018 and 2017, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for the years then ended, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America

And here is what management said about improving the control systems

Remediation
Management has been implementing and continues to implement measures designed to ensure that control deficiencies contributing to the material weakness are remediated, such that these controls are designed, implemented and operating effectively. The remediation actions to the Company’s internal controls over financial reporting include a thorough review and documentation of all processes involved in our financial reporting to ensure that there is segregation of duties, access security and documented review processes in place that happen at appropriate intervals throughout the year that covers all elements of the Company’s financial reporting. This includes, but is not limited to, testing samples and documenting that testing has occurred with the results of the findings being reported to senior management and that they occur at appropriate intervals and continuously making improvements to our processes as necessary.

To addres ineffective design, implementation and monitoring of information technology general controls pertaining to the Company’s change management process, the Company has
(i) removed all live access to all developers, internal and external, from being able to make coding changes directly in our reporting system; 
(ii) will continue to monitor and document all changes made in our reporting system and add additional layers of documented review of these changes; 
(iii) will institute sample testing of changes made in our reporting system to ensure the documented policies are being followed and report the results of these tests to senior management in regular appropriate intervals; and 
(iv) enhance our quarterly reporting on the remediation measures to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors. We believe that these actions will remediate the material weakness.

The weakness will not be considered remediated, however, until the applicable controls operate for a sufficient period of time and management has concluded, through testing, that these controls are operating effectively. We expect that the remediation of this material weakness will be completed prior to the end of fiscal 2019.

[admin]

As a side note, previous visitors using the Chrome browser might need to clear out their cache to experience the new site much better (see here how to do that).

[admin]

Another argument that seems to inspire the critics is that the company doesn't name all their new customers when they report increased backlog and customers. Here a few pointers:

• The auditor just vouched for their financial results (despite being critical of their control systems, see the first entry in this thread). This should include the backlog, which is based on these new contract wins.
  
• What else can explain the 101% organic revenue growth but converting backlog (which comes from these new contracts)?
  
• It isn't unusual for companies not naming their customers (see below).
  
• The Artilium and iPass acquisitions were largely (and even completely, as in the case of iPass) paid for by Pareteum shares. Would the people of the acquired companies really have accepted these if they had doubts about the validity of Pareteum's contracts? Would they even wanted to be acquired at all by a supposedly dodgy company?? Keep in mind both of these acquired companies had strategic cooperation agreements with Pareteum before they were acquired. They knew how the company was operating and often went after prospects together.
  
• We do know at least some of their customers. Vodafone is still responsible for 40% of their revenues and has been instrumental in developing and marketing Pareteum's Global Mobility Cloud Platform. Deutsche Telecom is a customer of iPass.
  
• Would Jean-Paul Menke, non-executive director of Artilium which was acquired by Pareteum in Q3 last year, buy 12M shares as CEO of a Swiss wealth managing firm Hoving Partners knowing these contracts are dud?
  
• Management argues they don't publish the names of many customers for competitive reasons and avoid poaching.
  

By coincidence, our latest article on SA is about Intelligent Systems (INS).. Here is what the CEO said on their Q4CC:

So, let's hit those first. Understand that in almost all of our agreements and contracts we have NDA, nondisclosure agreements that prohibit us from disclosing the fact that we have an agreement without prior permission. Why do we agree to that? Well really, why not. We work and supply services to our customer, and our customer should be able to disclose whatever they wish to their customers without CoreCard interference. In some cases, our customers find it advantageous to disclose fully or partially that CoreCard is their vendor. In other cases, it's a well kept secret. And in many cases our customer may say to us, do not publicly or in writing disclose that it's okay to use our name in talking to prospective customers. So, unlike some of our competitors, we don't put our press releases or announce new contracts other than where pretty much required in our filings or shareholder communications.

So why is there such a discrepancy between the 36 month backlog ($800M) and the revenue (2018: $32.4M)?

• Backlog itself increased tremendously, from $147M at the end of 2017 to $615M at the end of 2018 to $800 (including iPass) in mid-March 2019.
  
• It takes between 90 and 180 days between contract win and deployment
  
• The contracts are heavily back-loaded, with just 15% of contract value generated in the first year, on average.
  

So backlog was still fairly small in 2017, it takes time for it to start generating revenues, and these revenues take time to scale with most of them (55% on average) coming only in the third contract year.

But this gives great visibility! (see here).

[Cann]

Shorts: 

Hal Turner did a great job making everyone believe these fake contracts are money in the bank

A simple question: Where does the 101% organic revenue growth in 2018 actually come from?

Simple answer: From converting backlog..

And where does the backlog come from? 

From these contracts..

Fake contracts, LOL!

[admin]

Classic short tactics, once you refute one argument, they immediately come up with another. First they complain that contracts don't have names of customers announced and therefore they must be fake. This is nonsense of course (see this thread above), but anyway.

Now that we have a name (Citrix, this morning) and a significant one at that they complain there are no $$ value published. See the immediate shift.

They would be crazy to publish the dollar value, for competitive reasons.

So this argument can be easily refused either, and they will come up with another one, just desperate that anything will stick.

And once you have refuted all their arguments they simply start anew, hoping the sheer mass of nonsense will stick to the company's reputation as something controversial and frighten off a few investors who can't see through this.

Don't fall for this, I've seen this film more than once.

[Cann]

Or one can simply just ignore all the nonsense coming out of the shorts and sit back and enjoy the ride, even if at times it can be a little rocky.

[admin]

Should get the mid march short interest updated any day now.

Fun fun fun till daddy takes their teumbird away.

Yes, that will be interesting to see. Very difficult to bring this down with the amount of buyers the stock has ready to pounce on weakness, and the stream of positive company news. 

The shares are still really quite moderately priced. Twilio has a market cap of $16B, that's 35x that of Pareteum or so. They will produce only something like 9x Pareteum's revenues this year.

Basically Pareteum is selling at 4x sales, really quite moderate for a CPaaS company (communication platform as a service, if you must know..).

[mikeyf]

I work in commercial construction/design, which is also a backlog dependent industry, and I am very comfortable investing in companies that carry backlog and use it as a metric of future revenue. The backlog number itself, and how it grows from month to month, paints a picture of how efficiently the company operates and how much demand there is for their services.

As a TEUM investor, A major buy indicator I am looking for is the combination of accelerated backlog conversion with a growing backlog number. To see both accelerated conversion and increased backlog happening represents exponential growth and it puts a smile on this investor's face.

When a company is running sideways, the backlog will be high/low from month to month (alternating) as existing unfulfilled contracts carry over while others clear out with the occasional contract win. When a company is doing poorly, the backlog will go down with revenue as no new contracts are awarded. It's such a simple metric to follow and understand and makes it easy to know when you should buy/hold/sell.

Regarding the validity of their customers: This question was presented directly to them in a CC a few quarters back during the post conference Q&A. I am lazy so I am not going to dig it up, but the response was essentially that they work in an industry where there is potential for customer poaching so the identities are held back whenever possible. Obviously if they land a whale contract with a publicly traded company, they will disclose this as the information will have to be shared with the share holders (for example, Citrix). It really is that simple and not something to be concerned with.

[admin]

Hi Mike, welcome aboard!

And thanks for your perspective from experience in the field, the backlog gives great revenue visibility, we have a guy here who put that in a spreadsheet even. It takes a while as it can take 90-180 days to start hooking them up and then revenues are small in the first year, but then it starts to accelerate and even if not all backlog is converted (customers can go out of business, etc.) even at 80% conversion this gives us great growth for years to come.

Ad to that the 214% net retention rate and existing customers tend to greatly expand on their initial contract.

You make a valid point for keeping customer names private, perhaps when Pareteum's competitive position increases more customers can be made public (like today's contract with Citrix), although this depends on the customer as well.

[admin]

You will see them using (or, more likely, referring to as they don't have to provide an actual chart) technical analysis with dire predictions that if such and such level not hold, the stock will collapse to some specified much lower level.

Keep in mind:

• Academic research almost invariably shows technical analysis isn't useful (see below)
  
• Technical analysis predicts nothing. Even if some support or resistance level is breached, it doesn't mean it the stock will necessarily fall or climb, it can just as well reverse course again.
  
• There are so many levels and instruments that any observer might look at the chart differently, which provides bad faith people with the perfect opportunity to simply suit a level or instrument that supports their case, that is, it is wide open to abuse. 
  

Academics largely see technical analysis as pseudoscientific nonsense. Stock prices are random, says efficient market theorist Burton Malkiel, author of the classic A Random Walk on Wall Street. Investors who rely on technical analysis “will accomplish nothing but increasing substantially the brokerage charges they pay”, he writes. Legendary investors such as Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch agree. Buffett has said he “realised that technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the chart upside down and didn’t get a different answer”. To Lynch, charts “are great for predicting the past”.

Charting the stock markets: does technical analysis work?