{"id":626,"date":"2007-04-25T16:33:29","date_gmt":"2007-04-25T21:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/2007\/04\/25\/todays-earnings-call-for-overstock-ostk\/"},"modified":"2011-10-31T21:48:59","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T02:48:59","slug":"todays-earnings-call-for-overstock-ostk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/todays-earnings-call-for-overstock-ostk\/","title":{"rendered":"Today&#8217;s Earnings Call For Overstock (OSTK)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/04\/Dr-Patrick-Byrne.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"lazyload alignright size-full wp-image-6885\" title=\"Dr Patrick Byrne\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%27%20width%3D%27230%27%20height%3D%27153%27%20viewBox%3D%270%200%20230%20153%27%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%27230%27%20height%3D%27153%27%20fill-opacity%3D%220%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E\" data-orig-src=\"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/04\/Dr-Patrick-Byrne.jpg\" alt=\"Patrick Byrne CEO Overstock Sith Lord\" width=\"230\" height=\"153\" \/><\/a>It seems that the executives of online retailer Overtsock.com may want to invest in a good dictionary.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/internet.seekingalpha.com\/article\/33509\">transcript of today&#8217;s earnings call<\/a>, they said:<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Jason C. Lindsey: <\/strong>&#8220;I am pleased with the quarter. I think we made a big improvement&#8230;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Patrick M. Byrne: <\/strong>&#8220;I will echo that&#8230; I think that this is what we aimed for a year ago but I am not sure that either Jason or I believed we could actually get to this point but we are excited about these operating improvements.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Improvements? Pleased??? Come on now. Their definition of &#8220;improving&#8221; certainly must be a lot different from mine. Why? The company is doing horribly:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Revenue<\/strong> for the quarter was <strong>down<\/strong> 11%<\/li>\n<li><strong>Operating losses<\/strong> for the quarter were <strong>$17.7 million<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Operating losses<\/strong> were $3.5 million <strong>more <\/strong>than last year<\/li>\n<li><strong>Net losses<\/strong> for the quarter were <strong>$21.4 million<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Net losses<\/strong> were $5.5 million<strong> more<\/strong> than last year<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Who in their right mind believes that such numbers represent an <strong>improvement<\/strong> in the business???<br \/>\nOh sure, the one bright spot is that gross margins improved. That&#8217;s what they&#8217;re hanging their hat on Or did they? Sam Antar raises some <a href=\"http:\/\/whitecollarfraud.blogspot.com\/2007\/04\/questions-securities-and-exchange.html\">really good questions about Overstock&#8217;s third and fourth quarters of 2006<\/a>, and in particular, questions about inventories and gross margins. (Note that none of the analysts asked any of the questions, and Overstock executives certainly didn&#8217;t offer up any answers voluntarily.)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fool.com\/investing\/general\/2007\/04\/25\/dramatic-losses-at-overstock.aspx\">The Motley Fool<\/a> had this to say about the earnings call:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Our business is dramatically improving.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Bold words from a man who runs an online retailer that burned $58 million in cash on revenues of $158 million. But then we&#8217;re used to bold words from Patrick Byrne, CEO of<strong> Overstock.com <\/strong> <span class=\"ticker\">(Nasdaq: <a href=\"http:\/\/quote.fool.com\/summary.aspx?s=OSTK\">OSTK<\/a>)<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve pointed out many times, Overstock is waging a losing battle against the likes of<strong> Amazon.com <\/strong> <span class=\"ticker\">(Nasdaq: <a href=\"http:\/\/quote.fool.com\/summary.aspx?s=AMZN\">AMZN<\/a>)<\/span> and anyone else who&#8217;s got the time to sell online. I also think Amazon is a horrible business for investors. (Great for consumers, though.) Its blowout earnings today are weak where they count: Cash flow is flat. So, if Amazon can&#8217;t get &#8216;er done despite a 32% increase in revenues, why would anyone assume Overstock could with a top line that&#8217;s moving in reverse?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I found the following comments by Byrnes amusing. We&#8217;ll call this the &#8220;we secretly screwed up and we&#8217;re secretly fixing the secret screw up&#8221; explanation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I think we really stopped figuring out the new things about 2004, 2005. We have figured out something we missed, something really big &#8212; well, I think it is really big. We are working on it diligently. A lot of it is actually coming together this quarter.<\/p>\n<p>But I am not going to make the mistake I made in past years, which was to tell the world what we have figured out, so I am not going to mention what it is. But we did &#8212; we see now that we missed something big that had happened on the Internet and we have been working hard really for about six months to fix that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder what&#8217;s next for Overstock. Will anyone hold them to account?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that the executives of online retailer Overtsock.com may want to invest in a good dictionary. According to the transcript of today&#8217;s earnings call, they said:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[827],"tags":[1331,915,188,987],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-companies","tag-motley-fool","tag-overstock","tag-patrick-byrne","tag-sam-antar"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-a6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}