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Tilting at windmills: EV Group on a roll, but the numbers don't provide the whole story |
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Nov 07, 2007 at 04:25 PM |
Erich Thallner, founder/CEO of EV Group, proudly announced Tuesday that his company had a very healthy fiscal 2007, its best year ever, growing 30% in both revenues and order intake: Now if only we had a clue what EVG's actual billings and bookings were, those percentages would be even more meaningful.
EVG saw growth in its MEMS, advanced packaging, SOI, LEDs, and other business segments, but it remains a mystery which segments provided what specific portions of the company's business and cash flow, other than Thallner's citing of "high-volume" applications as a main driver.
The company is family-run and privately held, so it doesn't have to divulge much, if any, financial information. It's not like EVG is some start-up or early-stage outfit, operating in stealth mode far from prying market eyes. But wouldn't it be nice to know just how successful, in actual hard-currency amounts, one of the fastest-growing midsize micro/nano process tool companies really is?
It may be a pet peeve, and yes, I'm tilting at a proverbial windmill, but I don't like the unlevel playing field of financial disclosure, where the most secretive elements of the private sector can keep most or all of their results to themselves, while the public sector guys have to share, sometimes more than they'd like. It's hard enough to get certain relevant info out of the listed companies, especially those with a distorted sense of what is "proprietary." In this age of private-equity ownership of an ever-increasing number of companies across the micro/nanomanufacturing value chain, the lack of transparency and information-sharing has only aggravated my grumbliness.
Take EVG's Austrian colleagues SEZ---a publicly traded semiconductor equipment company---which had to issue its all-too-detailed quarterly earnings (er, losses) late last month. The report revealed a huge downturn in recent business (37% hit in sales, 36% dive in orders), largely caused by stagnant DRAM and foundry orders. In SEZ's case, at least we know what the before/after comparative bookings and billings figures were, providing an actual dollar (or Swiss franc) amount, instead of a percentage unmoored from its constituent figures. The Villach crew would love to play down their current woes (and might they be feeling a wee bit envious of EVG for a number of reasons?), but hey, they gotta air out their dirty laundry just like any other company beholden to public shareholders.
Call me naive or idealistic, but I still believe that percentages stated without the context of actual financial result numbers fall into the realm of hyperbole. Congratulations EVG, but just what are you really worth?
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Comment by nickward on 2007-11-09 13:57:38
It's a private company so why should they have to reveal any anything - SEZ took the public's money and has to pay the price in openess. The main point is that the EVG press release is useless and information free - why even bother to pick it up. |
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