The secret of their non-success

An enterprising fellow on the Yahoo! boards recently reveals a scan he made of an estimate received on SPD "ThermaLite" window from Thermoview. It really kind of speaks for itself...


... but to review (and in case the print is too small for you), that's a hair under $21,000 (plus sales tax), for ten 24" x 36" SPD windows. Not particularly big windows! Oh, and that doesn't including shipping. From Korea. (Because it's not as if Thermoview believed in the product enough to keep an inventory on hand). And best of all, installation? That's your problem! Good luck finding someone to do it.

Small wonder, then, that sales of Alterlite windows were, shall we say, less than robust.

The question arises, therefore, whether the current offering of SPD shades from Raytheon Aircraft is in fact any more affordable. Unfortunately, that's a question currently without an answer. Though you'd think at least lip service would be made to the idea of improved affordability, were that in fact the case.

Payday!

Yesterday, in the middle the mild camouflage of a renewed flurry of tiny purchases by board member and former SPD message-board evangelist Al Malvino, REFR president and COO Joe Harary cashed in quite lucratively on the recent surge in the share price of his company's stock.

Per the SEC filing on the transaction, Harary exercised just over 100,000 options, using the proceeds from the majority of the shares to leave himself with 34,792 shares free and clear, which he promptly proceeded to sell at about $10.10 per share, thus pocketing a neat little bonus of just over $350,000. A sum that, it bears noting, is more than the company earned in license fee revenue (to say nothing of earnings) from the years 2004 and 2005 combined.

Meanwhile, today, investors in REFR (and to be fair, almost everywhere else) are taking it on the chin big time, as the offering price of $9.75 appears to have been decisively breached (not that there was any real support at that level anyway).

If nothing else, it sure tells you where this company's management's priorities really lie.