Same time next year?

A report on the secret annual shareholders' meeting has finally made its way public. It comes from a new alias to the boards, and is even self-described as "sketchy", so no warranties here, but it's something to go on.

• Hitachi was present, in the form of Tadao Kurosawa, president and CEO of Hitachi Chemical USA (really, a very small subsubdivision of the famous Japanese corporation).
• Steve Abadi from Innovative glass, he of the Extreme Makeover PR attempt, was also present, and suggesting he had large orders awaiting the availability of the Gen 2 film, in a way that typically left him an out to say he never meant that.
• Hotel Technologies was also represented, most likely by Steve Belmonte.
• Both the new and old auditors showed up, presmably to reassure everyone that there was no suggestion of accounting issues. One would hope not, there being so little to actually account for here.
  
• Then again, who needs accounting shenanigans, when the company proceeds to announce that Joe Harary is giving himself a $50,000 bonus for raising the $5 million last winter, and the shareholders don't even bat an eye. That said, this was apparently offset by someone else's salary decreasing. It wasn't clear who was taking the cut, though most likely it would be founder Bob Saxe, who is no doubt winding down towards retirement.
• In a refreshing bow to reality, the company confessed that commercialization was taking "too long". It went on to admit that mass production was still "at least several more months, maybe much longer" away (emphasis added). But then they added a small carrot in the form of a successful test run, but subsequent reports revealed that the results were not repeatable. In a way, unrepeatable success is actually worse that consistent failure, because that makes it a lot harder to figure out what's going wrong. That's where ISO 9000 and that whole business came from.
• In the interest of completeness, I'll add that other reports later claimed the licensees were much more optimistic in private. (Funny how that works!) Some even claimed that the licensees somehow knew each others' positions relative to achieving mass production and thus who was "ahead". Of course, that begs the question of why the licensees would share that kind of information with direct competitors but not the public.
  
• Then in a moment that showed that some of these shareholders are just naturally unhinged, someone asked about a buyout by General Electric that would amount to over $700 million. Management, to its credit, gently dismissed the suggestion.
• The report wrapped up by mentioning some technical discussion which was not reported in detail, and a reference to an upcoming SPD display at the following week's (now this week's) Paris Air Show.

Management's inability to suggest a date for commercialization, or even give the ubiquitous "soon" (although by now that term had reached running- joke status), can't be sitting well with shareholders, and probably goes a long way towards explaining the stock's weakness last week. Of course, the inability to give guidance is a direct result of the company's passive business model.

So, lacking any assurance that any chance for royalty revenue is forthcoming anytime soon, management will have no choice but to start the fundraising process all over again this summer. And with that, another increase in the authorized shares seems inevitable, as a mere million shares at a useful discount to current prices isn't going to go very far at all.

Interesting times for REFR shareholders. But I wouldn't want to live in them.