Saturday, September 1, 2012

Manpower and the sinking ship

It has been a while since I've talked about Manpower. Their recent earnings were not much to talk about.

Their earnings released July of this year had them come out with earnings of .51 vs. .87 compared to the three months from the prior year.

Net earnings came in at $41 million versus $72.7 million from the prior year.

Even as the one time charges were not accounted for earnings came in at .76 a share.

Although, the EPS in the next quarter is expected to be up from the 2nd quarter Manpower remains a sinking ship.

With the advent of Linkedin, and more nimble middle market producers Manpower continues to face pricing and competitive challenges. A quick look at their Australian operations makes you wonder if they would be better served to make additional staff redundant. The level of production specifically from some of the "producers" has been sub par compared to some other firms.

So even as MAN finds itself having to slash as economies in Europe, Manpower's largest market faces continued headwinds and decline, where will Manpower find itself in the next number of years.

If stories hold true that a construction and a decline in pricing for commodity prices then MAN will face even more challenges especially if industrial production doesn't pick up. For a company with the size of its workforce to only generate $41million in net earnings is a slap in the face of shareholders.

Manpower needs to continue to reorganize and look at the hard facts internally and make cuts when they are warranted and make cuts to staff that continue to under perform the mean.

Please do your own research on MAN as I'm just providing my opinion. I've tracked MAN a number of years and have continued to sour on management's ability to make sound and newsworthy decisions.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Yammer continues to push its tools past Broadvision on the enterprise

With the lack of posts from Lebed and the NIA regarding Broadvision (BVSN) I would like to touch on a point with regards to one of Broadvision's competitor, Yammer.

As Yammer continues to reach itself to start ups and to the enterprise they are one of the exhibitors at Netsuite's SuiteWorld 2012.

Netsuite SuiteWorld 2012 Exhibitors

This is one of the fundamental issues with Broadvision. They haven't been able to capture attention from the larger enterprise players. With weak macro economics in Europe one of Broadvision's larger markets, Broadvision will have to find a way to compete with more flexible and better funded competitors. Without getting itself out into the public Broadvision will remain a lower tier has been rather than the ambitious tout that Lebed and NIA would lead one to believe.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Broadvision reports first quarter Q1 2012 earnings

So Broadvision reported earnings and continues to displace the notion that earnings will be robust. With its continued weak performance and the downward slide in revenue the tout machine Lebed and NIA have a lot of explaining to do.

Revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $3.8 million
The previous quarter which was the fourth quarter of 2011 revenue was $4.2 million
Revenue for the first quarter of 2011 was $5.1 million

Licensing revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $1.4 million
The previous quarter licensing revenue came in at $1.6 million
Licensing revenue for the first quarter of 2011 came in at $1.5 million

Cash and investments came in at $55.3 million
Cash last quarter came in at $54.4 million
Cash came in first quarter of 2011 at $60.9 million

Again, it seems that traction with Clearvale clearly has not materialized in their revenue to offset their legacy platform of K2 and QuickSilver.

Without any near term catalyst Broadvision will continue to face a challenging path to justify its current valuation. Without new management and clout to remain competitive Broadvision will remain a blip in among the titans. Broadvision has created very minimal shareholder value for the past decade till this recent run-up with the touting by Lebed and NIA. Clearly they have every intentions to tout this stock, however buyer beware as the results speak for themselves that Broadvision continues to be a company in decline.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Daily Ramblings Lebed Broadvision BVSN

Lebed recently touted that the upcoming Broadvision earnings release that he expects an announcement of "large purchases" by Broadvision employees.

"I expect BVSN to announce that their employees purchased an extremely large amount of BVSN stock in the 1Q. BVSN had 4.529 million shares outstanding at the end of 2011, but when BVSN filed their 10-K on March 8th, they disclosed 4.598 million shares outstanding as of the end of February."

Although this could potentially happen it doesn't offset the CFO filing to sell over 180,000 shares. Lebed as usually continues to misinform investors and the general community with half truths.

As stated on fool.com "But, perhaps the biggest news of the night came from CFO, Shin-Yuan Tzou, who filed to sell 180,713 shares at $40.73."

Broadvision Fool.com

Monday, April 16, 2012

Beware of the Facebook hype

CNBC just posted today a video regarding the caution of the hyping and the touting that warns that the investing community needs to be aware prior to investing in any company that uses the keyword Facebook.

Beware of the Facebook hype

Lebed strikes again with its tout of Broadvision BVSN

Lebed yesterday sent out another tout piece regarding Broadvision (ticker: BVSN).

Lebed continues tout misinformation or overzealous information regarding Broadvision and its indirect competitors.

"CRM's flagship social enterprise product is a free social platform for businesses called 'Chatter', which is competing directly with both Yammer and BVSN's free Clearvale Express!

Yammer recently raised $85 million in venture capital funding in a deal that values the company at approximately $1 billion. Both Yammer and BVSN's Clearvale Express are substantially better than CRM's Chatter!"


Lebed continues to state that because of Salesforce.com's growing relevance in enterprise software that Broadvision should be valued higher. What Lebed fails to state is that even within Salesforce.com Yammer is a small component of Salesforce.com's ecosystem of enterprise software. The main users of Yammer are internal within Salesforce employees. During a recent look at Salesforce.com they touted their Yammer to attendees and to their employees however it was not a well known aspect of Yammer. Nor do they intent to make it the main feature of their company.

A point that Lebed and the NIA doesn't point out is how limited Broadvision's user base has become. Salesforce trade shows generally have over 30,000 attendees, even proclaiming more attendees than Oracle. Broadvision continues to bleed its user base with very limited traction. With very limited information besides the number of customers that it enlisted, Broadvision should have an interesting earnings conference call this quarter. Who could forget when Broadvision stated that they have no knowledge of unusual trading activity. The CFO clearly took notice as he filed to sell over 180,000 shares during a recent filing.

If Broadvision were to receive they would have garnered a look from private equity companies since Clearvale has been released since 2009. Where has Broadvision revenue went since 2000? It has continued to face declines in both revenue and profitability, with even the CEO Chen stating that is not in their best interests to seek profitability near term as they seek to gain traction in the marketplace and users.

Compared to every single company that Lebed has stated such as Facebook, Salesforce.com, Jive, and recently Instagram, Broadvision has nothing in common in terms of an investor means besides it producing software.

Broadvision's revenue and user base has continued to decline in comparison to the before mentioned companies.

"It means nothing that BVSN's current Clearvale revenues are small. Facebook just acquired Instagram for $1 billion, when it had zero revenues! Every major software company is going to want to break into the enterprise social space in order to take advantage of the 61% annual growth that is ahead! Companies that haven't already developed their own enterprise social platform in recent years, will have no other choice but to acquire one that has already been fully developed! Huge consolidation could soon take place in this space! If just one major acquisition is soon announced, BVSN could explode towards $100 per share overnight, in my opinion!"

Another reason to be cautious. Lebed is touting Broadvision to be similar in some way to Instagram. Instagram has grown its user base from well under one million to over thirty million in a limited amount of time. Where has Broadvision's user base been if you may ask? Consistently down. Just look at all the risks that Broadvision faces in their 10-K filing.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

NIA Fluff Piece on Broadvision BVSN

With the recent pending IPO of Facebook the National Inflation Association has started its tout job of Broadvision (BVSN).

"BVSN's current market cap at $26.62 is only $122.45 million. After subtracting BVSN's $54.4 million in cash and $17 million in value for their legacy products, BVSN's Clearvale enterprise social platform is currently worth an insanely low $51.05 million. NIA believes that BVSN at only $26.62 per share is by far the biggest opportunity in the market today!"

What the NIA hasn't disclosed is that Broadvision continues to burn through its cash quarter after quarter. Only through a rights offering did Broadvision stem the bleeding of its cash. With only one potential viable product in Clearvale they have to offset Quicksilver and K2 product lines (legacy products) which customers continue to leave in droves. Who would pay $17 million or more for a product that the enterprise has not seen as a viable solution in over a decade, the last time of which Broadvision was actually growing. For a decade the CEO has been collecting his annual salary while shareholders were shafted.

"Facebook has $3.71 billion in revenues and is expected to go public with a valuation of $100 billion, which equals 27 times sales. If BVSN generates just $64 million in annual revenues and is worth 27 times sales,BVSN would be worth $1.728 billion and with 4.6 million shares outstanding it would equal a share price for BVSN of $375.65. Imagine if BVSN captures a 10% market share! Even with a more conservative price/sales ratio of 10, a 10% market share could mean $640 million in annual revenues, a market cap of $6.4 billion, and a share price of $1,391.30!"

Again NIA with its nonsense. To compare Facebook and Broadvision is like comparing gold to cooper. For the past decade while Facebook was growing and adding users Broadvision annual losses and declining revenue continues to pile up. The next thing you know is that the NIA will compare Broadvision to Salesforce because they both have an app on iTunes. Clearly these companies are different since Broadvision hasn't seen the light besides this extended tout by the NIA and Lebed.

"BVSN could potentially become the Facebook of enterprise social networking. While BVSN signed 33 new customers last quarter, JIVE only grew by 10 new customers. In fact, JIVE needed to spend $13 million on marketing last quarter to grow by 10 customers. BVSN only spent $1.5 million on marketing last quarter and achieved much larger customer growth!"

What the NIA doesn't state is how many of these customers are actually paying customers rather than just customers who have been using the free edition of ClearVale. What is the actual rate that is actually willing to convert from free to paying customers? And what is the average billing rate for these customers?

Again, in its recent number of touts the NIA has FAILED to mention that the CFO of Broadvision has filed to sell 180,000+ shares. For its mention that short sellers are actting like vultures over BVSN might be a bit overstated since additional shares will be on the market courtesy of the CFO.

Another fact that NIA hasn't mentioned is why it had sold shares within the last two months when they are touting figures into 2016. Wouldn't you think that with Broadvision supposedly growing gangbusters in the future that everyone should be holding their shares and people should be selling their homes for this gold mine?

Contact the SEC at http://www.sec.gov/complaint/select.shtml to file a complaint.


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