After many months of struggling to be compliant with the SEC’s requirements after a few very questionable quarters, OCZ [NASDAQ:OCZ] has hit yet another roadblock. Many of their investors that stuck through their tough times have been holding on to hopes that the company would eventually be bought out, as was the original plan. Since Ryan Petersen did such a great job of running the company into the ground in the hopes of getting acquired, OCZ has struggled to stay in the game and compete with companies like SanDisk, Samsung and Toshiba.
Since the rumors of the Seagate acquisition, which was basically a done deal, OCZ has had a few fluctuations up and down in terms of share price. However, it has never recovered since the Seagate talks fell apart. Most recently there were a lot of rumors going around that Toshiba was interested in buying OCZ, considering that OCZ is really struggling financially but still has a brand name. While we can’t substantiate any of those claims regarding Toshiba, we can say that it looks like a lot of investors caught wind that the Toshiba deal wasn’t going to be happening. Because, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stock drop 33% in regular trading and not get halted.
OCZ’s stock was allowed to go from an opening price of over $1.06 all the way down to $0.71. While nobody can directly attribute any specific article or piece of news, I believe that a lot of it has to do with the rumored Toshiba talks. Because I haven’t heard any recent news about OCZ’s sales or financials nor have there been any postings. OCZ posted their financials for Q2 2013 almost a month ago, where they posted a loss of $20 million.
Based on all of these developments, it remains to be seen whether or not OCZ can continue to operate as a company and whether or not they will even be listed on the NASDAQ since they are now effectively a penny stock. We will continue to watch the company closely as things develop, however, it doesn’t bode well for the company, their employees or their customers. We have been cautiously optimistic about OCZ’s outlook in the future, but I’m fairly sure that the company has just been damned by their own investors.
