A tale of two companies

After 16 months of poor results and declining stock price, the Starbucks board replaced their CEO. Since his start in March 2023, the CEO oversaw a 22% stock decline but also a 32% decline from its peak of $115 to $78 over the last 16 months. Lots of other poor results from his tenure including new store sales and same store sales and average sales. A real bad situation for which the board acted to turn it around with a new CEO and new strategy for which no doubt he is chartered to field a new executive team to accomplish. Seeing an aggressive board take action lifted Starbucks stock up 22%. Shareholders voted they were on the wrong path.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2024/08/13/why-starbucks-stock-could-more-than-double-under-new-ceo/

Juxtapose Viasat against that where our board is complacent in the face an 80% decline in stock value from $90 to $16 over the past five years. It's been even worse down to $11 yet the board has neglected to act. Add to those results the incongruous nice executive compensation packages noted in other posts. Now more than a few institutional investors are fed up and took advantage of the recent dead cat bounce to unload their positions of 11million shares. Those four institutional investors are in the top eight holders of Viasat. They. Want. Out.

Is the board finally compelled to act? Do they really believe the plans proffered by the executive team are the best use of shareholder value? Is our stable of executives from the old battles suitable for fighting the new battles posed by StarLink and Kuiper? If not now and if not over the past five years, what is sufficient erosion in shareholder value and confidence to trigger a change in leadership team and directions? We can keep talking about how great it was to figure out ionospheric scintillation but our competitors have too and there is a different battle out there being lost.

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Ionospheric scintillation indeed. That was a tedious Results All-Hands with MD just engaging in near-monologue about how capacity usage optimisation will save the day (it won’t)…and nicely running out the clock so there was no time for the advertised staff Q&A…unless that was a kept as a bonus for those attending in-person after the call ended. If any of the Exec read this board, you seriously need to do better. You are insanely well-compensated and the staff of this company deserve better in the face of well-organised competition

This sale is merely a group of Canadian funds that had an ownership stake in Inmarsat when it was private company.

Prior to going private in 2021, Inmarsat was a públic company traded on stock exchanges.

By going private, these funds had no way of liquidating their position

In June 2023, these same funds received cash AND those 11.2 millón shares 14 months ago.

There is a “lockup” period of one year where they could not sell their shares. See SEC Rule 144.

14 months later (yesterday) those funds could finally liquidate (waited for the quarterly earnings call to complete too) and get the rest of the proceeds from the merger sale.

These guys were going to sell their shares after one year whether the price was $20 or $200. They already made their money through the cash consideration and were then waiting to get that second piece of 11.2 million shares placed in their brokerage accounts. A teachers pension fund has no business holding a large stake in Space Stocks! Their goal is to create low risk low rate returns in the most boring manner possible to pay retired teachers in their 60s 70s and 80s.

They will just have to dump their shares on the next short squeze

The point

You

Indeed, that Chipotle CEO tripled their stock price after six years. Not too shabby.

Starbucks? You mean like the company that replace a terrible CEO with another terrible CEO (chipotle)? lol

Thread regarding ViaSat Inc. layoffs

A tale of two companies

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