""Given the trends that we're exhibiting, the reversal in those trends, I'm just trying to understand what confidence that we can put in a reasonable timeframe, long term is a fairly vague definition, a reasonable time frame for evolution toward a 55% OR." — RBC; "One of the pushbacks we get in sort of recommending your stock is that there is a perception out there that maybe management is a little bit taking their time on the margin side. There isn't as much of a sense of urgency." — Bernstein; "Lance, I wonder if you could just give your investors a little bit of confidence... you guys have had some pretty significant OR targets out there for some time now." — Barclays; "Our analysis shows a significant efficiency gap between Union Pacific and its peers... This structural opportunity is execution-dependent but we sense the productivity improvement momentum currently occurring in the U.S. railroads, in part due to the management changes at CSX, provides significant incentive for management to attack this opportunity with more vigor." — BMO; "...we expect that management will begin to act with a sense of urgency to restore investor confidence (or will face increasing pressure to do so)." — Bernstein; "[on relative underperformance vs. peers] "...this is a tough question. But Lance, is there a sense of urgency that's been elevated?" — Deutsche Bank; "Ultimately, management needs to deliver better cost performance and under constant questioning they remained steadfast in their outlook to do so... we believe pressure will build on management to execute well." — Citi; "...I just want to understand what's embedded in the back-half guidance or the revised full year guidance? Because this is now the second time in, I don't know, 40-45 days that we're revising the full year outlook. ...there are a few people out there that have many decades of PSR experience that have been PSR implemented... Those guys seem to be available on a consultancy basis. I don't know if there is scope to bring in somebody on a short-term basis to accelerate some of the progress... Is that something that you're considering or looking at doing?" — Deutsche Bank; "I want to ask just a bigger picture question. I think some people are questioning the success or maybe the sustainability of PSR. ... We were supposed to do at 55% this year on our way to a lower low to mid-50s OR in a couple of years. Are those just the wrong numbers to be thinking about now for the OR over time?" — Wolfe; "And then for next year, I heard the word confident a lot. ...but not confident enough to give the OR guide for next year of 55%. ...is 55% achievable for next year?" — RBC; "...you laid out a multiyear productivity improvement for the network. ...are you confident that you can eventually obtain the aggregate plan over time? ...reset at a lower level going forward?" — Evercore ISI; "...can you talk a little bit to the longer-term transition plans? What skill sets do you think the Board really is focused on for the next leader of the business." — Susquehanna; "After a period pre-pandemic where significant improvement in operating efficiency resulted in the mgmt. team at the time boasting a forecast for an 'industry leading O/R,' mgmt. has now backed off that objective... Looking back to the period late 2016 to early 2019, that time was characterized by guidance that lacked conviction, a dearth of PSR expertise at the mgmt. level and (ultimately) sub-par operating results. Fundamentally, we are concerned that we are entering a new period characterized by the very same challenges." — RBC"
Callouts & quotes from 10,384+ activist slides
Every emphasised callout and every pulled quote, extracted slide-by-slide. Search by keyword, filter by slide type or by source.
""Despite Juniper's strong fundamental performance this year that has driven the Street's EPS estimates higher versus a year ago, Juniper's stock (up 10% YTD) has underperformed relative to the S&P 500 Index (up 26%) in 2013. As such, we discussed the opportunity for an accelerated stock repurchase program with Juniper. ... We believe a $3 billion stock repurchase program could be 15-20% accretive to EPS" — Cantor Fitzgerald (12/11/13); "With respect to uses of cash, is there an argument for giving a committed level of cash return to shareholders out of free cash flow, given the healthy cash balance you have, given that it feels like cash flow, as a trend, should be rising going forward?" — Credit Suisse, CS Tech Conference (12/4/13); "Over the past three years, free cash flow generation at Juniper has averaged over $550 million per year. Further, the company has a relatively strong balance sheet with $2.8 billion of net cash at the end of the June quarter or 26% of the current market cap. ... we believe Juniper could and should institute a more formal capital return strategy" — Credit Suisse (9/18/13); "We believe there is scope for increased cash distribution" — Credit Suisse (9/18/13); "Healthy cash flow, no dividend. A quarterly dividend of $0.08/share would be very reasonable (potential yield 1.6%), but nothing's planned as yet" — RBC (8/12/13); "Juniper is a member of a club that most investors would like to see it resign from: Out of the 35 largest Hardware & Equip companies globally, JNPR is one of only four that is not expected to pay a dividend over the NTM. We believe it is time for JNPR to quit this club. ... we think a dividend would be viewed as a much-needed sign of mgmt's longer-term confidence. ... The knock-on positive effect of paying a dividend is bringing a whole new class of shareholders into the ownership base" — Citi (6/7/13); "We think it is time that Juniper quits the non-dividend payers and joins the overwhelming majority of global peers that directly return cash to shareholders" — Citi (6/7/13); "Risks to our Sell rating include a stronger carrier spending environment, improved competitive positioning, or a more aggressive capital allocation strategy, including the introduction of a dividend or a large buyback" — Goldman Sachs (4/24/13); "What would make us more positive? More aggressive capital allocation and/or activist shareholder involvement. Juniper's strong balance sheet ... and cash flow generation (estimated 7% FCF yield in CY13) make it a strong candidate for a significant buy-back or initiation of a dividend" — Goldman Sachs (3/19/13); "Juniper's share repurchases are typically used to offset stock option dilution resulting from the company's employee stock plans rather than being opportunistic buybacks based on price" — Goldman Sachs (6/13/12)"
""longer works because FD is now a detriment to the combined entity's valuation, 3) management seems unwilling to acknowledge the asset is destroying value, so 4) while the only hope is activism at this point - given management's ongoing hope that FD can rebound - the potential for activism seems low...." — Barclays – August 30, 2018; "Finally, we have also begun to field questions from investors about management's ability to successfully turnaround Family Dollar and whether DLTR would consider other strategic options...we are growing concerned that such a heavy focus of time, capital, and opex is being spent on Family Dollar with little to no fundamental improvement and that it may be better spent on the core Dollar Tree segment." — Goldman Sachs – August 30, 2018; "The market's interest in sum-of-the-parts (SOTP) and a potential break-up clearly indicates that the wheels have come off the Family Dollar bull thesis. This turnaround has stalled much too early and the core business, while producing good top-line, is experiencing margin pressure...Family Dollar a Clear Disappointment: Three years after closing on this turnaround project, comps are weak, the productivity gap to DG is as large as ever, and margins are back-tracking after initial progress. We estimate the value destruction of this deal at $7 billion...We were not fans of this transaction from the start, and it's now clear that DLTR would have been much better off today if they had not done this deal." — Wells Fargo – July 11, 2018; "While very low likelihood, in our view, DLTR could go down the path of multiple price points at Dollar Tree or simply raising the single price point. This could be done with or without the divestiture of Family Dollar stores. While, on paper, we understand the attractiveness of such a move (better comps and profit dollar growth, temporarily) we don't see the current Board or management team as amenable." — Credit Suisse – June 12, 2018; "Family Dollar's performance has disappointed investors – We have been disappointed/frustrated with Family Dollar's progression.... A 10% premium to the market for Dollar Tree implies investors are essentially getting Family Dollar for FREE...In this case, investors have essentially attributed ZERO value to Family Dollar's 8,000 stores, $10 billion of sales and $512mmE of EBIT." — RBC – June 8, 2018; "The Dollar Tree concept has been highly successful, but there remains significant opportunity to unlock value by expanding price points and we see three reasons this catalyst could arrive sooner than expected...Lastly, we believe the moment of truth is here for Family Dollar, and failure to drive a more meaningful comp improvement could leave management searching for another source of growth." — Wells Fargo – May 18, 2018"
""We believe the exit of CEO Kevin Johnson raises some concerns around execution, which has been largely uneven of late. That said, his eventual successor could be more opportunistic around costs and buybacks, while simplifying the product line. Time will tell" — Barclays (7/24/13); "Can we speak about the cost structure of Juniper and the scope for it to become more efficient? Because compared to many of the larger IT telecom equipment networking stocks, the operating expense to sales ratio ... [is] almost one of the highest of all the companies that we've looked at. ... Is it a case of direct cost-cutting?" — Credit Suisse, CS Tech Conference (12/4/13); "One of the frustrations I hear from investors is around OpEx and OpEx management. I think you have one of the highest percentages in terms of sales of R&D spend. We've seen other companies in the sector that have throttled back on OpEx, returning cash in an aggressive way, and they're being rewarded for that" — UBS, UBS Tech Conference (11/19/13); "Cost cutting should be focal. Juniper's operating margin structure has been under pressure for several years ... Over the same period revenue has grown at a CAGR of 3.3% per year which raises questions about management's ability to control operating expenses. On an absolute dollar basis, operating expenses have risen by over $300 million from $1.8 billion in 2010 to $2.1 billion in 2012 which, as a percentage of sales, is the highest within our coverage universe" — Credit Suisse (9/18/13); "The retirement of CEO Kevin Johnson, while not expected this quarter, could provide an opportunity for a new strategic approach given the difficulties the company has faced. At the very least, it gives the stock a chance to benefit from the restructuring and realignment story that usually occurs after a CEO transition" — Morgan Stanley (7/24/13); "We view the increased opex as disappointing as leverage was one of the main reasons investors were attracted to Juniper's stock" — Stifel Nicolaus (7/24/13); "We continue to believe the company's R&D level is far too high and generates below average returns compared to rivals such as Cisco and F5 which have R&D in the 10-11% of revenue range" — Wedbush Securities (6/13/12); "The main issue that is impacting Juniper's opex structure is the number of new projects the company has undertaken ..., each of which required big new investments. ... In our view, the underwhelming initial reception for MobileNext and QFabric is evidence that the company should adopt a more prudent investment strategy going forward .... We also believe that Juniper should address its cost structure ... including exiting lagging businesses" — Bank of America Merrill Lynch (5/23/12)"
""On the product portfolio side, is there an argument that Juniper should be somewhat more focused?" — Credit Suisse, CS Tech Conference (12/4/13); "Juniper's current product cycle ramp seems to be the result of efforts to out-innovate the competition beyond what the business organization structure could support." — FBR (9/18/13); "The Security business has been a very difficult one. ... Is that a core business for Juniper? Or could it be a candidate for divestiture at some point?" — Citigroup, Citi Global Technology Conference (9/4/13); "We wonder if a new CEO would initiate a restructuring. Specifically, we believe that the company has too many products that continue to underperform, especially on the security side" — Stifel Nicolaus (8/20/13); "And when QFabric came along, there was a very big promise. And yet it hasn't really delivered to where your expectations were" — Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer Technology Conference (8/13/13); "Juniper has been donating market share in security for several years now implying a new strategic direction may be considered" — RBC (8/12/13); "In security, Juniper has been trying to stabilize the business for some time. You have $2.8 billion in cash, which incidentally is the check that Cisco wrote this morning to acquire Sourcefire. So with that in mind, how do you accelerate change for the security division with the limited resources?" — RBC, Q2'13 Earnings Call (7/23/13); "Is it possible to separate [enterprise security] from the carrier security side and sort of run it for cash as opposed to for growth?" — Morgan Stanley, Q2'13 Earnings Call (7/23/13); "As the networking market has shown sort of below trend growth over the last several years, if it continues to be sluggish how will you guys think about right-sizing your business or restructuring to fit this new level of growth" — Investor Q&A, BAML Conference (6/5/13); "Juniper has had higher than average senior management turnover over the last 3 years. While change is constant in Silicon Valley, we are focused on future execution in the switching business, as two executives who led their entry into the market, Hitesh Sheth and David Yen, departed to competitors in 2009 and 2011" — Goldman Sachs (3/19/13); "Loss of focus, loss of share - We attribute Juniper's share losses to a number of factors... Beyond product deficiencies, we believe the company's dispersed efforts on multiple fronts (new routers, data center switches, MPLS, etc) restricted funding availability for sales efforts, exacerbating the problem" — Bank of America Merrill Lynch (1/8/13)"
""And so I joined Danaher. And with the team there, we evolved the Danaher Business System to be far beyond factories. So over the last 14 years in Danaher -- and I'm sure you've seen that in investor presentations how much we, at the time, they know, talk about what we did on sales, on marketing, on service, on how to accelerate innovation and so on. All of those things are 100% applicable at Johnson Controls." — JCI Wolfe Conference 5/25/2025; "On the services side, it's all about ensuring that the value of delivering and the way we deliver that value, that strong customer relationship translates into strong project to service conversion, and we're quite pleased on what we're seeing there as well as our software solutions to where now you're able to decouple ourselves from the natural investment cycles, investment cycles are either building a new building or they have a refurbishment plan coming up." — HON Wolfe Conference 5/20/2025; "We built a very strong service organization with dedicated and centralized playbooks that help serve our customers with life cycle management solutions." — CARR Carrier's Analyst Day 5/19/2025; "And some of our customers want an OEM that stand behind the system and service the assets over its life, and hopefully, is there for the replacement down the line." — JCI BofA Conference 5/14/2025; "Finally, our technological capabilities and our product domains are impressive. Our capabilities are evidenced by our many industry firsts and nearly 8,000 patents with more coming. Johnson Controls has come a long way over the last several years. But as I said, there's still great potential to unlock in this iconic technology-based and service-enabled company." — JCI Q2'25 Earnings Call 5/07/2025; "Yes. I mean I think the service business, obviously -- these are very sophisticated systems. So think of it as, the more sophisticated the system, the more aptitude there is for the OEM to do the service work, I'd start with that." — TT J.P. Morgan Conference 3/11/2025; "So that's the strength of the equipment markets. It brings the service tail and that service tail doesn't really start in those first 2 or 3 years post installation, right? There's warranty periods, and we get through that warranty period and then the newer product probably needs a little bit less service, but you start growing that over time. The service dollars really bring that 8x to 10x the value of services versus the original equipment. That really starts kicking in a few years after installation." — TT Barclays Conference 2/19/2025"
"Okay, great. And finally, your gross margins went up sequentially, which is interesting given that your payments revenue is ramping. Can you comment that dynamic? Is that reflective of the strength within the software business [when you had some higher] ARPU in the quarter? Or are you also seeing some improvement in your payment margins based on your growing scale? — BMO Analyst, Nov 2020. Yes, a little bit of all of the above. I mean, we obviously, given the growth in customers, saw some nice increase in the subscription line churn starting to come back towards normal, again, which helped a lot. Some of the discounting measures that we had in place are going [all start there a little off balance], as you know. We do continue to kind of look for ways to drive incremental margin and payments. And I guess, the other aspect to the overall gross margin is -- as you know, we do have some legacy payment referral revenue streams. And as those volumes are covered in the quarter as well, it would have been incremental to margin? — CEO Dasilva, Nov 2020. You have the very helpful slide that shows the adoption and some of the geos and verticals. Certainly seems to be going in the right direction. I'm just kind of curious once we think about what this is going to look like maybe after we've incorporated ShopKeep and Upserve, which I believe have higher ARPUs in part because they've been successful at payments, if we should be expecting it to kick up? Or just curious on how the incorporation of those companies will impact these dynamics? — Keybanc Analyst, Feb 2021. Yes, for sure, will tick up the Upserve business in particular. The vast majority of their customers were using Upserve payments as kind of they have a really nice elegant solution that embeds Payments right into the product itself. ShopKeep, they were further along as well on the Payments journey from a customer adoption perspective, though as we've talked about, largely through a referral model, but a good percentage of their customers do use a payment solution there. And as we talked about earlier, the teams are working hard to move those or to build the infrastructure to make sure that Lightspeed Payments is available to those customers. So all told, we expect those things to really positively impact our overall penetration at a global level. And of course, that's core to what we're trying to do around here is to make sure that the vast majority of our customers worldwide take Payments. So all these things, I think, are helpful. — CFO Nussey, Feb 2021"
""Our analysis of a theoretical model in which 80% of BWLD is franchised along conservative industry standards yields per share valuations significantly higher than BWLD's current share price" — Nick Setyan, Wedbush, 2/8/17; "[D]irectionally the activist plan is a much better plan than the one the current management team is focused on" — Howard Penney, Hedgeye, 8/18/16; "[T]he math [on a transition to a 90% franchised business model] looks intriguing, even when using what we think are conservative assumptions" — David Tarantino, Baird, 10/24/16; "[D]uring its Analyst Day...[Management] failed to address any changes to BWLD's long-term company/franchise store mix (now at 52% company-owned, which we believe should be reduced) by defending ongoing consideration of future franchise purchases (where we would hope for a re-franchising strategy)" — Paul Westra, Stifel, 8/16/16; "We like the potential for additional value-unlocking actions or a more drastic tack in strategy in-line with some of the ideas outlined in a recent 13D filing...Investors may look past downward revisions if the prospect of transformative action is on the table, but if this is called into doubt, fundamentals suggest a lower price for the stock" — John Zolidis, Buckingham, 9/15/16; "[A] falling [ROIC] as a result of higher capex could suggest a greater proportion of units would create more per share value as franchised units (e.g., where the same capex could be deployed for share repurchases)...Investors remain highly focused on the potential opportunity for BWLD to increase its franchise mix" — Karen Holthouse, Goldman Sachs, 8/4/16; "We view refranchising as a realistic alternative path to value creation for shareholders...Investors often forget BWLD was >65% franchised a few years ago. Our conversations with brokers that specialize in restaurant and franchisee transactions lead us to believe the appetite for most of BWLD's markets would be strong, and could command multiples towards the higher end of the 5-6x unit-level EBITDA industry standard"' — Nick Setyan, Wedbush, 9/12/16; "We believe investors would applaud the introduction of multi-year refranchising programs from Buffalo Wild Wings" — Jeff Farmer, Wells Fargo, 7/13/16; "'Logic' supports the premise that a franchise model is better insulated against economic volatility, generating a high margin annuity stream of royalties with limited operating volatility...We expect investors to further encourage (re)franchising / licensing at [BWLD]" — Jeffrey Bernstein, Barclays, 5/17/16"
"I knew TaskUs was getting ready to go public, but I'd had some, disillusionment and frustration there and thought, you know, certain aspects of even going public, aren't gonna change this. Of course, yes, it's been breaking down. So they went from a people first statement to frontline first statement (chuckle). They've had a real difficult time with their sales team. Lots of turnover. I think the longest tenure now they have is like somebody who's been there three years, so they've gone through many teams. Because, I think Jaspar did a lot of sales and didn't really like sales people and sort of thought, (Hey, we've done a little hard work to bringing you on so all you're gonna do is be an order taker. So we're not gonna really esteem you here and you gotta get up at 3:00 AM to take a call and even though you live in America and even though every other BPO has their support teams work in American hours because most of India or the Philippines works, you know, during the night during American hours). So you had a lot of people get turned off by that in sales. They had a sub-standard compensation plan and you had a guy over the whole team who was never in a sales position. So, didn't really identify with, what would work or not. I'm sure he is good in other areas, but when it comes to some of those, there's a higher turnover. Not having someone to get the sales and biz development rocking and rolling is an issue. Some that got lucky in the right target market are making money, and some people doing so hot. And then, you know, training, onboarding for different roles has been tough. And it's just like any organization, you need to spread really fast just because you have capital and you can buy systems and you can recruit people. You know, there's still all those internal connections of getting things running smoothly. So I saw a lot of deals lost because we didn't have office space and then COVID hit and they got better at remote and some remote security. So that took away some of those concerns. But then, new sites, opening going really rough, having new clients in there, and having them some not great experiences and then moving on to more mature BPOs. I'm seeing from my perspective there's some nice fat clients at TaskUs that are hitting those limitations and we're going to be making a switch. I think that could be happening. I didn't invest in the stock because I think the price to value is out of whack. I think it's a bit overvalued. — Former Business Development Employee"
""The large variability in capex versus original guidance (just set six months ago) demonstrates some lack of capital discipline within the company." — Citigroup (July 25, 2012); "On the upstream side, we question whether the company has the bandwidth to operate in over 20 countries... We do not believe a company of Hess's size will get credit in the market for a shotgun approach to investing across the world." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012); "The key issue for HES in our mind is capital intensity and the inability of management in recent years to live within the limits of its cash flows. Furthermore, given the lack of growth in oil and gas production over the last 5 years, there is a case to be made that the company should return more cash back to shareholders instead of attempting to grow at all." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012); "We are skeptical that Hess's current global growth strategy will yield superior returns or growth, as its organization appears to be spread thin and we think it is unlikely that Hess can have a competitive advantage in all the areas it is pursuing." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012); "We believe Hess should consider further reducing its exploration program beyond what has already been announced. It is not clear to us given the levels of exploration spending versus cash flows that a mid-sized oil company can successfully pursue a global exploration strategy as Hess has attempted... The company's high-risk/high-potential exploration and acreage strategy since 2009 is thus far not yielding favorable results." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012); "The 7% pullback in the stock was severe, and in our view, is indicative of a loss of investor confidence in HES's execution capabilities, following a string of production misses and a lack of notable exploration success, in addition to a growing deficit between capex and cash flow. Entering 1Q'12, HES had missed its production guidance for four of the preceding 5 quarters, meaning execution was at a premium." — Simmons (April 26, 2012); "Although we think the company's underlying asset value is worth significantly higher than our near-term price target, we now believe the shares will likely continue to struggle throughout this year and will trade substantially below our estimate of its fair asset value due to the lack of visible catalysts as well increased investor skepticism over management's execution record..." — Barclays (April 26, 2012)"
""We took some money from several money from several places to offer our teachers these raises, which was historic," Hutchinson said. "We didn't have that money sitting around someplace. We had to find it. ... These budget adjustments free up resources for us." — Mike Hutchinson, Oakland Unified Board President; "The reality is, we have no money anywhere. So we're going to have to make some tough choices, and everybody needs to be involved." — Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy, West Contra Costa Unified School Board President; "We need to transition responsibly, from an era of COVID emergency funds to an era around the corner where the five and a half billion that we have been living off will all disappear," said Carvalho. "If we did not begin the process now, a year from now it will be impossible to do so without incredible pain." — Alberto Carvalho, Los Angeles Unified Superintendent; "I wish there was a way for high-poverty schools like mine to have extended-year funding so our kids could be safe for more months of the year and receive activities they love and want to come to school for all year long." — Stacey Cole, Storm Lake Schools Superintendent; "I never want to be the superintendent that has to reduce staff to get to a number, because I understand that there's a human being behind it, and that human being is connected to a family. It's never easy for me." — Nikolai Vitti, Detroit Public Schools Superintendent; "We're adding 230 new positions, mostly funded by ESSER, that's 230 people on top of the current vacancies, that we will either have to lay off next year or in subsequent years or hope that the city has the extra $100 million to cover their salaries and benefits." — Brendan Cardet-Hernandez, Boston Public Schools School Committee Member; "I would not want to spend ESSER funding knowing we are in a $1.3 million deficit and not knowing what the future looks like, it is really not right to start a program we cannot support until we are in a position where we know we can sustain it." — Dede Galdston, Watertown Public Schools Superintendent; "This week...we've issued some notifications to employees about they're being considered for 'RIF' and displacement so that is happening," said Dr. Brent Jones, SPS superintendent. "We're in that phase right now." — Dr. Brent Jones, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent."
"“We think the frequency of HES's analyst meetings could be increased. How about biannual?” — Merrill Lynch (May 22, 2006). “The key question, in our view, going forward is whether Hess is starting to spread itself too thin via a growing project portfolio list.” — Goldman Sachs (April 26, 2006). “The aggressive upstream exploration story driven by John O'Connor is under pressure, as a run of dry holes is looming larger. With no completion target, the story has an uncertain future, costs are rising and prospects are pushed from this year to next.” — Deutsche Bank (April 26, 2006). “This company has not historically shown good capital discipline, delivering one of the highest F&D costs in the sector and one of the lower returns on capital.” — Bank of America (January 27, 2005). “Despite a new record quarterly oil price environment and sequentially much higher production levels, worldwide unit profitability rose only marginally ... because of continued heavy hedging loss (no surprise here) and a sharp increase of costs.” — Lehman Brothers (January 27, 2005). “Hess's long-term share performance has been hampered by an inability to show sustainable volume growth and value creation in the upstream...As a result, Hess's 10-year share price performance has been the weakest among the integrated oils.” — Merrill Lynch (October 21, 2004). “Following several years of missed targets, [Hess] has refrained from offering production guidance much beyond the current year. Whilst this plays to its benefit by avoiding the risk of over promising / under delivery, it also clouds the outlook over the coming years. HES's reluctance to commit to any long-term production objectives is understandable in the context of a poor track record where a succession of aggressive growth targets has been missed.” — Citigroup Smith Barney (October 11, 2004). “Hess needs to spend aggressively to arrest its imploding production profile. The risk is whether these capital investments will generate competitive returns, a concern to investors given the recent history of production and reserve disappointments...” — Merrill Lynch (April 29, 2004). “The question, in our view, is whether Hess is truly creating a culture that is focused on profitability first.” — Goldman Sachs (February 6, 2004)."
""Consumers increasingly see the value of a fiber broadband connection and the utility of a gig plus sort of in terms of what serves their household." — John Stratton, Executive Chairman of the Board, Frontier Communications - May 2024; "We grew ARPU because our customers are increasingly choosing gigabit speeds and value-added services to enhance their Internet experience, and they're willing to pay for it. As a result, we accelerated fiber revenue growth to 13% and lifted our overall company revenue growth to 2% year-over-year." — Nick Jeffery, CEO, Frontier Communications - August 2024; "Firstly, building 1.3 million fiber passings this year will mean we will have delivered by the end of the year exactly the build ambition that we set out at emergence 2 years ago. And secondly, we are actually accelerating our build this year...The way to think about our build ambition of 1.3 million homes passed this year is at a minimum build from here on. We think we've got plenty of operational gas in the tank to further accelerate if and when the conditions are ready for that." — Nick Jeffery, CEO, Frontier Communications, February 2023; "We are moving fast on 2 of our key value drivers, building and selling fiber and it's translating into financial growth. If you look at the left-hand side, you will see that our fiber passings are up 31% year-over-year. And customer growth for the quarter is up 17%. With data consumption expected to triple by 2025, it's a great time to be in the fiber business." — Nick Jeffery, CEO, Frontier Communications, February 2023; "The long-term trends in our business remain extremely encouraging. Our industry thesis is based on the view that the significant growth in data consumption that we've seen over the past 2 decades will continue to ramp up, tripling over the next 4 years alone. We're confident that fiber is best positioned to meet the long-term demand for data consumption." — John Stratton, Executive Chairman of the Board, Frontier Communications, November 2022; "We built fiber at a record pace again, adding 351,000 new fiber locations. And as John shared, we will hit the halfway point in our initial goal of passing 10 million fiber homes later this month." — Nick Jeffery, CEO, Frontier Communications, November 2022"
""In exchange for releasing John Orr from his non-compete agreement with CP, Norfolk agreed to a one-time payment to CP of $25 million and also agreed to make "certain commercial and operational considerations related to the Meridian Speedway and the Meridian Terminal". These payments and concessions deserve scrutiny, in our view, given the potential competitive implications." — Deutsche Bank. "CP and Keith Creel look great on this trade... they're absorbing [Orr's] prior role into existing management (i.e., no cost to replace), while more importantly winning both a ~$25M payout from NS and commercial concessions related to NS's Meridian Speedway... While we don't know the specifics or value of the Meridian Speedway concessions, clearly they could be meaningful on this longer term Mexico-to-Southeast growth investment for CP and CSX connected by GWR." — Susquehanna. "Net net, we're underwhelmed by what we observed yesterday with respect to NSC's announcement. While John Orr is considered a good operator, it appears the cost to extract him from CP is notable and could have longer-lasting competitive implications, which is unfortunate in the context of the clear alternative. So in this sense, yesterday's announcement raises more questions than answers." — Deutsche Bank. "The bottom line is the cost of NSC's new COO appears higher than the headline would suggest. In addition to the $25 million one-time payment, it could also include capex to elongate sidings and concessions that lead to less volume for NSC and more volume for CP and CSX. More details and transparency is needed, in our view, given the company could have hired Jamie Boychuk with no concessions, who we consider to be best suited to be the COO of NSC given his long and successful track record." — Deutsche Bank. "Norfolk also provided some details on the Meridian Speedway agreement with CPKC that caused a significant amount of confusion and frustration over the last several weeks. We believe the management team already missed a few opportunities to clarify this issue ... Ultimately, Norfolk did not quantify the full cost so management will still have to address this issue on the 1Q24 earnings call, especially if the operating momentum does not continue to accelerate" — J.P. Morgan."
""To summarize, the key growth assets underperform, expectations are lowered, and a key investor fear – Hess's propensity to outspend cash flow – is stoked by an early upward revision to the 2012 budget." — Deutsche Bank (April 25, 2012); "Flowing through from the high capex and low growth, the company has the lowest yield and lowest dividend growth combination amongst major oils." — Deutsche Bank (July 27, 2011); "The company has continued to be a net issuer of equity...at a time when most of the other majors have been buying stock back... and has produced low return on capital employed for most of the present decade." — Bernstein (October 22, 2009); "The company's refining and marketing assets remain emphatically not for sale, despite the fact that redeploying downstream invested capital...to the much higher returning upstream would make solid business sense." — JP Morgan (September 17, 2009); "Hindsight: We can't believe you're back to more hedging." — Deutsche Bank (September 29, 2008); "Notwithstanding the romance of Leon Hess's development of the company from one oil delivery truck into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, by the early 2000's the company's reputation with investors was one of a struggling oil essentially run as if it were private." — Deutsche Bank (August 7, 2007); "Historic mistrust, with certain major potential shareholders reluctant to invest based on the issues faced in the past with a distinctly mixed record of shareholder value creation to say the least. Ultimately, John Hess is still in charge, and that provides a major link to the past. Hess has historically shown poor performance on operational metrics..." — Deutsche Bank (August 6, 2007); "The change in 2008 estimated EPS is due to our belief in the industry-wide cost pressures being sustained into next year and the company's inability to manage them quite as successfully as do the Majors." — Bank of America (April 26, 2007); "Continued exploration losses are value destructive." — Deutsche Bank (October 25, 2006); "It is important to highlight that the highest paid companies are also the best performers, with the arguable exception of Hess. He is a dynastic executive left in a business that resonates with family fortunes..." — Deutsche Bank (August 24, 2006)."
""Hess's near-term strategic outlook is fairly clear-cut: the company must improve. [Hess] will need to regain project management credibility after disappointing results..." — Bank of America (January 6, 2004); "Having lagged the recent rebound in the sector—adding to what has been long-term secular underperformance..." — Goldman Sachs (December 9, 2003); "We believe Hess had four issues it needed to overcome: Top management was not as strong as at its competitors; E&P asset base was very mature and short-lived; Balance sheet was weak; Capital discipline was expressed in words, but not practiced in actions." — Goldman Sachs (December 9, 2003); "Will perpetual restructuring mode ever end?" — Goldman Sachs (October 14, 2003); "Hess released another quarter of disappointing earnings...While offshore development delays are not uncommon for large oil and gas projects, Hess has consistently disappointed the market with operational performance over the past several quarters." — Bank of America (July 29, 2003); "[Hess] a company that we consider the most fundamentally flawed E&P or integrated in our investment grade universe... Unfortunately, these days a lack of astoundingly bad news is cause for celebration!" — Morgan Stanley Credit Research (May 1, 2003); "With below cost of capital ROACE, high upstream costs, and strategic impediments due to recurring high debt levels, we believe the Hess shares should continue to trade at a material discount vs. the integrated peer group. Moreover...we remain unconvinced that the company's planned upstream growth will lead to improved profitability and returns." — UBS Warburg (April 30, 2003); "The burden of high debt levels and low returns, with abandoned targets and a weak near-term production profile, leaves the management in need of reestablishing credibility and share price performance." — Deutsche Bank (April 8, 2003); "The material erosion of shareholder equity so soon after the completion of these two acquisitions is a clear disappointment... [It] also must raise questions as to the acquisition due diligence process within Hess...We believe investors' confidence in the company has been materially undermined..." — UBS Warburg (February 3, 2003)"
"[Medtronic] is saying - the intermediate aspiration catheter, the React - the microcatheter, the Phenom 27 - and then the stent retriever, and the wire, the Asahi wire...let's bundle all of this. The list price of all of this when you put it all together is $14,000 or $15,000. 'So we're going to give you a bundling discount, and let's now bring it down to $12,000. So if you use all of this together, and we're going to give you a discount to $12,000.' Well, if the doctors are using it already and like their products, then that's attractive to the hospital - it becomes very palatable to use this combination of bundling and so forth. So I think that it's a sales tactic - it's a tactic of 'you win, we win.' — Neurosurgeon. From a cost perspective, it is cheaper for us to use Medtronic. To go back to Penumbra, I would have to see a significant improvement in performance. I really don't think the pump is the distinguishing feature. Each company will now give you their pump for free. A few years ago when there was no competition, you had to buy the pump from Penumbra. — Neurosurgeon. The primary competitive advantage that Medtronic has over Penumbra is its company size and its ability to bundle its products across service lines and offer volume discounts to hospitals. From a pricing standpoint, Medtronic can be more aggressive than Penumbra or Terumo. Penumbra shouldn't rest on its laurels. It should make them nervous if Medtronic has painted a bulls-eye on them. Medtronic is a behemoth of a company that can flex its economic muscles -- it can bundle product and give rebates. Medtronic has great ways to encourage hospitals to use their products. Our hospital has a contract with Medtronic. [Us doctors] are always being pushed by hospital administration to use more Medtronic because of the greater rebates being offered. As more companies develop aspiration technology there will be more price competition. — Surgeon. Penumbra's stent retriever is definitely inferior. And its strategy of bundling a low-cost stent retriever with its aspiration catheters is not working. Others are already at price parity, so it doesn't really matter anyways. — Neurosurgeon"
"4/7/08: “Michael the good news is we have a team here that’s really working together.”; 7/8/09: “So the good news was we believe that there was room for improvement and here we go.”; 1/10/11: “Good news is, and you’ll see some of this here on the right-hand side, Alcoa continues to be recognized for what I would call values-based management.”; 10/6/08: “The good news is if you talk about real future projects, we can continue to look at future projects because as I said before our mid- to long-term prospect in alumina and aluminum is positive.”; 7/12/10: “I mean the good news is Russia is coming back.”; 4/11/11: “And the good news, also on top of it, 32% revenue growth on a year-over-year basis.”; 10/11/11: “We are, and that’s the good news here, whatever lies ahead of us, we are prepared to take it.”; 4/10/12: “And the good news also is all of that would not be possible if we wouldn’t have driven process innovations.”; 1/8/13: “In Europe, we expect a decline of 4% to 6% in 2013, and that is also relatively good news because the decline is slowing.”; 4/8/13: “But that’s better news -- I mean, more good news than bad news, I would say.”; 10/8/13: “So good news to come and I think the orders are showing in the right direction here.”; 1/12/09: “The good news is all of those markets are our end markets in Russia.”; 10/7/10: “So with that, let’s go to the aluminum demand and see what implications the end markets drive has on the aluminum demand, and this is actually pretty good news.”; 7/11/11: “And the good news is, we’ve constantly innovated and substituted our own solutions.”; 11/9/11: “So there’s a lot of moving elements in this segment of our business, we need the productivity but we also get it, and that’s the good news.”; 1/9/12: “Well, I think the good news is we’re doing it in addition to the things that we’ve done before.”; 11/7/12: “The good news is the growth rate is exactly in those fields that are higher-margin on traditionally and will be, that’s fantastic.”; 7/8/13: “This is the good news. I mean, the good news is that we will be able to grow our aerospace business, I mean, and every one of the segments that caters to aerospace.”"
"Other than these efforts, we are also working to strengthen our collaborations with professional agencies in building our talent pool and improving the content offerings. Historically, agencies have a limited role in Momo's live streaming ecosystem. We have noticed, since earlier this year that some quality talent agencies and MCNs are becoming increasingly mature in terms of talent management and content development. As a result, we are adjusting our operational policies to better support the high value-added agencies in traffic and other resources, as well as economic incentive. We believe that such adjustment will give the quality agencies bigger room to develop and does better motivate them to help us in developing talent and driving constant quality and diversity. It will also allow them to grow their business in a bigger way within our ecosystem, which in turn will grow ours. In November, we rolled out a trial plan, whereby the qualified agencies are provided with a different level of additional cash incentives if they reach certain growth targets. Although such incentives will likely cause cost in revenue to continue to fluctuate in the future, we believe it will better motivate the agencies and individual broadcasters to invest and grow their business within our ecosystem, which in turn will grow ours. Moving on to mobile marketing business, the new homepage design of 8.0 has diverted traffic from nearby people to other product modules. At the same time, we have also reduced the number of ad units in the nearby posts from 3 to 1. As nearby people and nearby posts are the two major carriers of the ad impressions. The 8.0-related changes have led to a significant decline in the ad inventory supply resulting in a sequential decrease in mobile marketing revenues during the third quarter. On the product side, one of the key hurdles that we had in improving the long-term user retention was the fact that our core use case, which was pretty much based on nearby people and instant messaging was kind of limited. In the past two years' time, we have made a lot of progresses in expanding the social use cases. — Tang Yan Q3 '17 Earnings Call"
"“Typically, when somebody talks about a fermenter, it's a pretty big piece of equipment. What they're doing is these micro-titer plates, which are mini-fermenters, and you can buy it. They took all of the money that they've raised, and they put it into the equipment to be able to do parallel processing of yeast cells. It's not always yeast, but yeast is their organism of choice.” — Former Ginkgo executive; “Exactly. It's a combination of a liquid handling system and analytics. It injects one sample—usually, they repeat it 10 times just to make sure. They inject it into the wells, carry out the fermentation, and then they have analytics to look at and see the results. The ones that they like the best, they further iterate on, and if those are promising, then they'll grow them up into larger fermenters. And these could be 10 mil or 100 mil bona fide fermenters where they've got agitation; they've got aeration, it's a controlled environment.” — Former Ginkgo executive; “Let's say you want to produce an ingredient that's used as a skin whitening agent. It exists in nature, but it's very expensive to isolate from the tree it grows on. What you can do is go to this tree; you can say here's a DNA sequence that encodes for it. Take that DNA sequence and put it in a yeast cell. Grow the yeast cell up in a fermenter, and it produces it. If you put it in a yeast cell, and it doesn't work, you look and say, what's wrong with it? It's a seven-step process, and each one of these steps requires an enzyme to be able to do the manipulation. You can think of it as like you're building a Lego model, and you need to put these pieces together, and each enzyme adds a different piece until you get the final product with all the pieces on there. You go, and you do your experiments, and you say what happened is the first four enzymes worked great, but the fifth enzyme just doesn't work, so I need to manipulate, I need to get a different enzyme. So, you go, and you try a different enzyme, and you put it back in the yeast cell, and you grow it up, and you try again. And then you try it again and again. It's a repetitive process.” — Former Ginkgo executive"
"“The CEO is a headwind to a turnaround. Firing him is the tailwind.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “I would rate them as the worst-performing management team in the airlines. This was a Company that has destroyed more value based on their own inaction than anyone else in the industry. They need to go.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “They need a new look across the board and you are only going to get that with [a CEO] who is not from Southwest... This is a classic example of where a disruptor stayed in the original model as the industry passed them by and now they have a problem.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “I have zero confidence this team can get this right and certainly not in the timeframe that is needed. I rarely call for wholesale change at a company, but that is what is needed here.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “Having the current CEO drive the process for a new strategy is not a good idea. I think that means we get glacial change and even if they say they are going to become SpaceX there is still going to be a fairly material overhang in the stock because of skepticism about the execution. This is a good time for the change.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “Would you ever see anyone issue a press release that says ‘35 year veteran of the company to drive significant strategic, operational and financial turnaround,’ which is what you would have to believe is possible if you think that Bob Jordan is the right CEO. You need a really different leader to right the ship.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “I don’t think this is the right CEO to lead the company and I would view his removal positively... Is this the leader you think is able to lead the company into the transformational change that is needed? I don’t think so and I am not sure other investors do either. I would be surprised if they did.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder; “So it is really [the CEO] has not done a good job running the company and what they have in front of them is considerably different than the job he came into, so this really is a natural time for a leadership succession. The Street would be widely supportive of a change.” — Top 10 Active Shareholder"
""Think, first off, on ERP, we are executing our program. We're now live with sort of 3 of our entities on our global SAP platform, corporate, CMF and Instruments. We have an active rollout plan for all of our divisions. And honestly, it's 2 to 3 a year, so that will roll out over the next couple of years here before we really start to feel that the platform is spread enough across the company that will drive significant efficiencies." — CFO Boehnlein, Q3 2019 Earnings Call. "Yes. So certainly, we've delivered the 30 to 50, but the underlying performance has been better than that, as you know, because we -- our acquisitions have had dilution. So underlying op margin has been expanding more sort of the 70, 80 bps range. And we really are just started on our -- on the big heavy lifting margin expansion. The way we've been getting it is through indirect procurement. It's been through I'd call it sort of hustle and sort of old-fashioned cost reduction. The bigger rocks, we haven't moved those yet and that has to do with the plant network. That has to do with the ERP. We've gone live with 3 of our divisions right now, but we still have a lot more to do, and frankly, globally to move to one SAP system. We had a huge implementation that occurred in July this year, which went very well. So we're really excited that we do have the right platform of ERP. We've been through some big integrations. Now it's just a question of rolling them out. That will take us 2 to 3 years to move to one ERP system." — CEO Lobo, MS Conf, Sept 10, 2019. "Impairment charges in the six months 2021 were not significant. In the second quarter of 2020, due to the significant negative impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on our operations and financial results, we suspended certain in-process investments resulting in charges of $189 to impair certain long-lived assets (primarily the portion of our investment in a new global ERP system that was in-process of being developed for future deployment) and product line and other exit costs. These charges were included in cost of sales and selling, general and administrative expenses." — Q2 2020 10-Q."
""We've seen [auto] revenue off of a substantial base doubled in each of the last two years. And we expect to grow, while not at that faster rate, well over 50% for several years to come" — CFO Stifel Conf June 2016; "Yes, for the automotive in MPS, as you know, we entered the market about 4 or 5 years ago, and 4 or 5 years ago, our revenue almost 0. And even 2, 3 years ago very teeny, teeny, tiny. And it takes a long time to get the revenue. And so design cycle is about 3 to 4 years. And we are total TAM in automotive, it's about $6 billion, probably a little -- now they're more than that. And so what is our percentage? It's less than 1%. So it's a total greenfield for us to grow" — CEO Hsing April 2017; "Yes, it is fair that the growth rate it will not change much. Okay, but don't quote me exactly what's the rate. It would be very similar to this year. Which applications or which segments, I think in the next couple of years we're going to expand lot more segments. Now the lighting, infotainments and the safeties, and we will have a lot more safety products come out. And as Bernie said in his script, we have an ADAS and also the battery management as well as the connectivities. And those areas have a very little revenue or some of the items have no revenue, only sampling. And we expect to have a very high percentage growth in -- a very dollar amount growth in 2019, '20 and '21" — CEO Hsing Commenting on Auto Feb 2018; "The other thing I want to also point out is we're growing so fast, okay? 55% year-on-year growth last year. Take a look at the total semiconductor market in auto. It's about 13%, right? 4x growth versus the market. And you can see the TAM that we're going after, $7 billion. ...Really, we're at this moment where the opportunity is incredible. MPS happens to be at the right place at the right time. We've learned from the last 5 years of innovation of selling. We understand the customers. We have the great products. We see the growth really continuing over the next 5, 6 years, easily, 40% to 50% CAGR" — Allan Chan MPWR Auto Marketing June 2018"
""So even though Danimer is building, well so they've built a commercial production facility, they're building more capacity. The trick is going to be taking on the petrochemical behemoths, your OPEC, BP, INEOS, Exxon, Dow Chemicals of the world that are able to price risk appropriately for a $1 billion investment in a petrochemical manufacturing facility in India that produces an order of magnitude, 10, 20, 30x the amount of material that Danimer's existing scale sits at, right? And so there is still a massive scale jump to actually take on the trillion-dollar plastics market. And so the idiosyncrasies in scaling a biochemical now or living chemistry-based process to that scale, it's certainly been done with wastewater treatment. It's going to have to be done with alternative protein production, but there's still a massive question mark around whether or not the science is able to play at that massive scale. And if it doesn't, then you're always going to be stuck in each product land, right, because you're never going to be able to bring those cost profiles down to the point where you can attack, commoditize polyolefins. And so that is the direction of questioning that I would go, if I were you, is to really, really dig in on what is their scale methodology? Does the biochemistry and bacteria-powered science work at that scale? How can you prove that? What are some of the red flags that has been shown in the past? So we could talk about that if you're interested. But that would be the direction that I would go in. The question should be where we started, which is in 5 to 8 years, are they going to be able to hold that position given their reliance on canola oil and seemingly an IP portfolio that isn't all that defensible? On their side? It would be a bit of a finger in the air, but we are able to model with feedstock pricing, what it is for us well below a dollar a pound, somewhere between $0.30 and $0.60. And I would imagine that they're considerably higher than that per pound than us because of the canola reliance." — Senior Executive, Danimer Competitor"
""We, therefore, encourage you to support the changes sought by our fellow shareholders at Elliott Management. We intend to support Elliott's proposed proxy slate because it serves the long-term interests of the Company and its owners." — First Pacific Advisors, February 6, 2017; "Independent members of this board, who own less than 0.1% of outstanding shares, continue to disregard the overwhelming publicly expressed desire for leadership change from the company's largest long-term owners, including Orbis." — Adam Karr, Orbis Investment Management, March 3, 2017; "Lion Point believes that Elliott's plan for value creation can reverse the past and set new Arconic on a better path to creating shareholder value." — Lion Point Capital, February 16, 2017; "It's a CEO problem—there has been no value created." — Sarat Sethi, Douglas Lane & Associates, February 30, 2017; "We also acknowledge activism could create an opportunity to highlight value that is even higher at $40 (and in the range of the activist target) to account for significant margin expansion from current levels, premised on a market P/E of 17x and earnings of $2.37." — Morgan Stanley, February 1, 2017; "In our view, a new CEO is an important positive catalyst to more expeditiously improve the company's operations and increase its margins while rationalizing capital expenditures / M&A opportunities." — Wolfe Research, February 6, 2017; "Elliott has a good case. Investor returns under Chief Executive Klaus Kleinfeld, who took over at Alcoa in 2008 and now runs Arconic, have been poor. Investors have seen their stock lose well over half its value under Kleinfeld." — Reuters, February 1, 2017; "Saving Klaus from Paul Singer is top priority for its management. Drain the swamp. Let Elliott Management's recommendations prevail. Too many good people are getting hurt throughout this Company." — Glass Door, March 17, 2017; "If I were an Arconic shareholder, I would be voting the "blue card" to bring the dissidents to power." — Pittsburgh Tribune, March 13, 2017"
""Congrats on a really nice print here. Kevin, maybe a big-picture question on pipeline. Given the strength we're seeing, what would you highlight for us when we look at the next year? I know the camera launch and some of the products you spoke about. Is there anything on Sage? I think I heard you guys talked about Sage. There was some talk about a new bed. Just help us out put these new product cycles in the context of a really strong CapEx environment." — Vijay Kumar, Evercore ISI; "...you obviously mentioned in your beds and stretchers business nice performance in the quarter and you made the comment that that was really without any new product introductions. So I guess the question is, what do you have coming there in 2019? And do you think that we might be at the beginning point of a replacement cycle? As I understand, I think the last replacement cycle certainly MedSurg was in the 2004, 2005 timeframe." — Larry Keusch, Raymond James; "I would tell you, across the board, whether it's 2019 or looking ahead to 2020, we have a number of product launches similar to prior years that are slated. And that includes Medical as well as other divisions. So I think that really is what underscores our conviction in being able to grow sales at the high end of med tech. Don't want to get into specifics around the launches for obvious reasons, but I would tell you we have a really good cadence and pipelines across all 3 of the primary businesses." — Katherine Owen, VP of Strategy & IR, Stryker; "Look, the replacement cycle is continuous, so there isn't sort of one massive replacement cycle. You have hospitals buying other hospitals that are wanting to standardize on their equipment." — Kevin Lobo, CEO, Stryker; "Our capital order book is very good. Look at something like beds and stretchers with double-digit growth and really without any significant new products. There's a couple of minor products, but nothing major. That's really our great execution and I would say fairly healthy markets." — Kevin Lobo, CEO, Stryker"
""It was always on the radar that they were going to run out of customers for cell line development specifically. So, the general idea was let's try to expand the range of applications to capture more customers that are not necessarily doing cell line development or are doing immuno-oncology or antibody discovery." — Former BLI scientist; "They've kind of gotten rid of cell line development and they've stopped touting it..." — Former BLI employee; "I think cell line development is a hard sell because everybody's got their version of what they think is the best path, a little bit of witchcraft which biology has sometimes, In CLD, it is very difficult to make an unambiguous statement. And that's because you're trying to say the counterfactual; if I would have run it on this other system, it would have been better. The only way to do that is to literally learn 300 independent campaigns on both types of systems and then measure the variability and the distributions of the cells." — Former BLI executive; "The status quo is to transfect the CHO cells... They have data, know it works, know the cost, have already bought the systems; it's sunk cost. And here comes this really expensive machine, and it's like, we can do things better. You go, that looks really cool, and I think that is true, but how can you prove it to me? Maybe that was a fluke. How much money am I prepared to spend to figure out whether that's true?" — Former BLI executive; "Sometimes pharma's are just rich and they just buy them. And it's just done. Sometimes they're very skeptical and have a hard time figuring out if they can spend $2 million. It's a lot of money. It's very difficult to prove how you are better without running something like a $200-million study, and who the hell is going to run a $200-million study with the risk of it not looking good if your total market is $300 million and your pricing actually takes that market down to $80 million. The return's not there." — Former BLI executive"
""The continued string of negative news has left management with some work to do to rebuild investor confidence." — Bank of America Credit Research (January 31, 2003); "We believe Hess should trade at a 5%-10% discount to the Domestic Oils based on...[and 3] Damaged management credibility." — JP Morgan (January 30, 2003); "Credibility matters, and Hess has little of it left." — Credit Suisse (January 30, 2003); "REITERATE UNDERPERFORM; E&P DETERIORATION A SERIOUS ISSUE There is no change to our Underperform rating for Hess despite the continued slide in its shares. We believe large write downs at its LLOG and Triton acquisitions coupled with continued erosion in its base E&P properties point to serious problems with the company's exploration and production business." — Goldman Sachs (January 30, 2003); "...While investors remain worried over the management's seemingly sloppy attitude to shareholders...We are increasingly concerned over Hess's continuing ability to generate these 'non recurring' charges ...Carelessness with shareholders equity is a worrying trait in any corporation." — Credit Suisse (January 30, 2003); "...We believe even if the disposal program is completed the portfolio improvement is unlikely to be sufficient to result in returns in excess of Hess's cost of capital." — UBS Warburg (November 5, 2002); "...Production forecasts were revised lower supporting concerns that we have had regarding economic value creation..." — Morgan Stanley (October 25, 2002); "Hess's stock fell 12% today on the back of a downgrade to 2003 and 2004 production expectations and a further write-down of the LLOG properties. While neither of these things is devastating to the company's value, we believe that management credibility at Hess has been stretched very thin...This charge will be seen by investors as a continuation of a disturbing pattern of special charges at Hess...again calling into question the company's judgment..." — Credit Suisse (October 24, 2002)."
"Q3 2008 call: “What we keep seeing from operators is one, great interest; two discussing details of the projects; three, discussions between operators and OEMers about joint projects for the next year.” — DSP Group Management; Q4 2008 call: “This year's Consumer Electronic Show was an important event for DSP Group during which our XpandR product line received a clear vote of confidence and proof from the marketplace that the strategic decisions and investments we previously made were right.” — DSP Group Management; Q1 2009 call: “I can say that we shall begin deliveries and we shall begin to see revenues in the fourth quarter...we had increased tractions with customers and we are basically building on this momentum and working together with these customers in order to a) get these designs into production. But as Eli said, we will start seeing revenues coming in the fourth quarter and I would say most of these designs will -- can really mature into -- will mature into products into next year.” — DSP Group Management; Q2 2009 call: “we are still on track, so we do expect to see some revenues towards the end of the fourth quarter of this year. But as we said also in the previous call, most of these design wins will mature into revenues in 2010. But as we said, some production and revenues are expected in the fourth quarter.” — DSP Group Management; Q1 2010 call: “Now your second question was a more color on the new product line, meaning the XpandR multimedia. And as we said in the previous conference call following CS, we're seeing a lot of interest in the product...we believe that this products will gain traction in the second half and towards next year..” — DSP Group Management; Q4 2010 call: “What I can tell you is that we feel very good about the traction that we get for instance with the multimedia handsets that we showed that are several and new designs with new brands that will be launched from the beginning of 2011.” — DSP Group Management"
"“As a customer, I know how much input I have in our success in helping them be successful. If I am another company and I don't have a head of synthetic biology that's going to be really working closely with them and monitoring their progress, it's going to be risky...It's going to be risky, yes, because I see how Ginkgo works and I see how much guidance I give them, and they're not at the level of, I could just forget about them and come back in a year, and they have a strain, and they have the best thing they can do. I'm going to be paying a lot of money without overseeing anything, and it's going to be—their chance of success without me guiding them is going to be very limited.” — Current Motif executive; “I would say they are too junior, yes. They've been growing very fast; they have amazing people, don't get me wrong, there are very smart people out there, but they're very young, and there are no senior people that really have the time to look and spend time on the science and understanding what's going on and make the right decisions. And so, they always revert to their high throughput platform, and it's just like their solution is always to go and test 1000 mutants. It's good to get all those mutants, and at the same time, sometimes you need to do and add those mutants together, and you don't need a robot to do that, you just need a little time to do it, and you need to select the right ones, and move forward. So, it's not like, magically, by screening a lot of mutants, you're going to be able to move forward. If you have a strain development that requires you to improve five different things, they'll be very good at focusing on each of these individual steps and find the best one of each of those steps. But then, when it comes to merging them together, they're going to be lumped into how many best mutants they do and things, and they need guidance. They get sidetracked sometimes, I would say.” — Current Motif executive"
""HES has been what we call a 'value trap' for some time." — Societe Generale (January 30, 2013). "In multiple client conversations throughout the day we found literally no one that defended the shape, nor global strategy of Hess." — Deutsche Bank (January 30, 2013). "The simple fact is the market doesn't trust Hess to run its business well, and thus places a discount on everything the company controls." — Morningstar (January 29, 2013). "This is the most undermanaged major oil company in the world." — Jim Cramer, CNBC Faber Report (January 29, 2013). "And so, one of the problems is the board is stuffed with incredibly long-serving members, none of whom seem to have any experience outside the company running an oil company, so there's a real lack of oil industry depth here. And coincidentally, they also happen to have very strong financial connections with the Hess family, helping to run the charitable board, helping to run the estate of the founders." — Reuters Breakingviews (January 29, 2013). "Hess' board has consistently failed its shareholders and has never brought management to task, ever... In light of the company's poor performance the last decade, this is clearly a board that gives John Hess what he wants, rather than doing what is good for shareholders." — Morningstar (January 29, 2013). "The stock price reflects concern about ballooning capital costs, chronic lack of free cash flow, a high oil price breakeven, and recent difficulty executing against guidance and expectations." — Deutsche Bank (October 17, 2012). "We think the market will largely adopt a wait and see approach and not give any free passes to management until clear path towards their cash flow targets and execution capability is evidenced... From a valuation perspective, we think the stock is relatively cheap as a result of the company's less-than-stellar historical performance record and perceived execution risk." — Barclays (July 26, 2012)."
""As a reminder, core revenue excludes the impact of businesses that we divested or made divest in both the current and prior year. It also excludes revenue from Mortara." — Steven Strobel, CFO, Hill-Rom; "Good morning. First question. I was just curious, philosophically this idea of core growth clearly, you -- as you mentioned you are excluding divestitures non-strategic assets and FX. But presumably, I'm just kind of curious the thought process as far as including Voalte. And obviously, it's helpful that you gave the color for the updated guidance excluding Voalte. But again, just curious on that core growth first question, is why did you exclude -- or why did you include rather Voalte in those numbers?" — John Hsu, Raymond James; "Thanks for the question. We give a lot of encouragement to keep things as simple as possible with core, non-core. We felt like for the Voalte contribution, which is pretty small for this year. I mean, we've talked about how it's modestly dilutive and from a top line standpoint, it'll deliver a -- some additional growth on the top line this year. But we're estimating by 50 basis points, not much more than that. We thought it was simpler to keep it in, given the small contribution, rather than introduce a new set of metrics that would be core, non-core, organic to core, organic, non-core however you would want to go for it. So we try to keep the message as simple as possible. And the -- like we said, the Voalte contribution is small enough that by giving you insight into the core revenue growth differences, we thought that was a good compromise." — Barbara Bodem, CFO, Hill-Rom; "And John, it's Mary Kay. Non-core also is defined as things that we divested wound down on non-strategic and Voalte obviously is a strategic acquisition for us, so we didn't feel with that fit into a non-core definition." — Mary Kay Ladone, CVP of Corporate Development, Strategy, and IR, Hill-Rom."
"“Most recently, I got a message from [redacted]. [Redacted] was a heavy user of TransMedics liver machine. They went into a contract, and then TransMedics started operating in this really inefficient way that we discussed earlier where they sometimes will commit to going to a donor maybe in Reno, but they show up with three planes, and so then [redacted] believed that they just ordered a $100,000 machine and service, but then a month later, they get $300,000, $400,000 worth of invoices because TransMedics is passing along all of these aircraft fees and the ground transportation fees to them. This colleague was explaining to me the situation where when they went into contract, none of this was agreed on. And so, internally, they were having trouble getting this routed appropriately through procurement at the hospital and needing to renegotiate or get it into the agreement. And so, it had been several months where they had not yet been able to reimburse TransMedics for the flight charges that they were trying to pass through to them. Well, Waleed reaches out to this transplant center, which is the largest transplant center in [redacted], and essentially gives them 48 hours to pay all of these flight charges that they never agreed to pay. TransMedics went on and incurred the charges on their own and then tried to pass along the charges to [redacted]. And essentially tells them that they are going to shut off access to the machine to them. They never even agreed to these expenses...I just found it very disturbing that they come in with these threats that their patients will no longer have access to these lifesaving grafts because they now want to be reimbursed for these flights retrospectively that they acknowledged was never in the agreement, but the incurred the charges and they want them to be paid anyway. And holding them hostage.” — Executive at a leading West Coast OPO, longtime industry veteran"
""But with the engine -- the new engines ramping up and the high level of technical sophistication, there's a lot of increased product introduction costs for qualification of the component. And at the same time, the legacy engine spares and replacements remain strong. So here, we have a different situation. We have very, very strong demand. At the same time, the ramp-up is accelerating, and we're going through the near-term teething issues here of the aero engine industry." — Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld, Alcoa Q3 Earnings Call, October 11, 2016; "So, the aero engine side, typically, in the past have always shown that there are these ramp up issues with the supply chain. In this case, we are seeing them again and we are seeing them probably a little bit more than in normal environment, very much driven by the level of technical sophistication and combined with the relatively long supply chain." — Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld, Arconic Roadshow, October 28, 2016; "Our isothermal and hot-die forge presses operated at or near record levels during the third quarter in support of growing next-generation engine builds. But on the forgings side both the hot-die and the isothermal, I mean, we're really very good at making those parts, quite frankly... we're good at it and our customers know that and where others might be stumbling a little bit as they maybe start to ramp up, we're there to support the customer...." — Richard J. Harshman, CEO of Allegheny Technologies, ATI Q3 Earnings Call, October 25, 2016; "The 2016 results were in line with what we last told you, however disappointing. Overall, we got it wrong on the non-aero side and our outlook substantially reduced for this market. On the aero side we are delayed but we will get there. We could have executed better and we recognize it and we own it and we are working diligently to improve the performance of this important asset." — Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld, January 31, 2017"
""Why should it cost $70,000-80,000 for disposables? The disposables are essentially plastic tubings and plastic containers and cartridges, and that's more than the cost of a brand-new luxury car that you're paying for a set of things that you throw in the garbage, essentially. It is, no question, overpriced...there's lots of precedence for this sort of stuff happening in the healthcare industry...you have all these other devices that are coming in, and the price will go down...on top of which...there's no question NRP is picking up." — Transplant surgeon and transplant program director at a leading Northeast academic center; "I don't think there's any magic to TransMedics per se. It's got cute bells and whistles; it travels. Let's face it: there's no secret sauce in this. Perfusion is in many ways perfusion and, in this case, normothermic perfusion is normothermic perfusion. It would be very hard to ascribe a special quality to one modality necessarily over another. If you can get that with one device comparably to another and logistically it's less challenging and certainly a whole lot less costly, then you go that way, there's no question. So, I think there will be a low threshold to jump over." — Transplant hepatologist in a leadership role at Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital; "The problem with the marketing is that they've expanded use which doesn't need to be expanded. In other words, they're talking about an $8 billion industry. That means that every organ would be pumped on the machine at $100,000; it's ridiculous. You're replacing a very cheap technology that costs a few thousand dollars with one that costs $100,000...one thing that you can take away from all of these studies also is that the patient and graft survival are no different between the cold storage and machine perfusion..." — One of the top liver transplant surgeons in the world, based at a leading academic center"
"…in Aquablation the learning curve is very short, and what I'll say is by and large, most physicians will develop proficiency within the first, let's call it anywhere from 10 to 20 procedures. And that really depends on the physician and how good they are as well. — Spruce Point Interview with Former Procept Executive, Nov 2024; with the previous generation, it heavily relied on Procept people in the room who were pretty much there handholding, guiding and training them. And it did take, I don't remember the exact number, what it used to take, but it took at least three months. So, three months of very scheduled handholding…we identified as an issue that many novice surgeons struggled with…thinking about a prostate in 2D [from the ultrasound image] but the cutting wasn't 2D right? …it's a 3D organ…and then that potentially led to risk of cutting too deep in areas that they were not supposed to…maybe you've spoken to somebody who was very experienced and for them it's easy, but we clearly saw this as an area where many struggled… — Spruce Point Interview with Former Procept Manager, Nov 2024; …right now, I would say 90% of all physicians need a representative of the company to be there present for the cases…you'll probably have physicians that have done 50 cases and still not independent…a lot of these new physicians that are coming out don't have the TURP skills, the semi rigid skills…So first and foremost, I do think there is a bigger learning curve for newer physicians, younger physicians than older physicians. — Spruce Point Interview with Former Procept Sales Rep, Nov 2024; I'm in my fifties. So let's just assume that in a year, I need to have BPH surgery. Would I do Aquablation? I probably would, but I wouldn't do it unless I went to somebody who had been on that robot for several years and have done a bunch of places. — Tegus Interview with Former Procept Sales Rep, Dec 2023"
""The main issues our engineers and experts are raising are trust in the data, a lack of transparency. Behavior in certain situations like extreme temperatures and so on. This is a big question mark where they're saying that we are having a lot of issues and a lot of risk. Those are [some of the] core questions that are circling around. They don't trust that you can charge it in 15 minutes, for example." — Senior member of Volkswagen’s EV battery effort. "I wouldn't say that nothing that we tried worked. I've been on a number of calls with people, a lot of them are into the hype, and they hear a hesitation in my voice, and they just can't believe that it's not real for whatever reason. But this is an extraordinarily hard thing to do to the point that most people can't really understand how hard it is...Most people who have not done some kind of industrial work in the past just have no idea how difficult this stuff is, how uncertain it is... This is a super-difficult problem like, basically, Nobel-Prize-winning work needs to be done to make solid-state batteries real." — Former employee #1. "A lot of the upper management have very good backgrounds, a lot of Stanford grads there. They absolutely wouldn't falsify data or fudge things. But the CEO, his [pause]...his [pause]...he's a different [pause]...he's different. He's different from the rest of their team, and he is totally in charge...Dissenting views have no place at the company...different interpretations of the science. You're picking up on it [the discrepancies]. I'm sure a lot of the science team there would do it differently, but it's all up to the CEO. Jagdeep is picking every slide, every picture, what the colors are...[he's] selling this vision on Jim Cramer's show and he hopes the data catches up to him...It's taking a long time, taking longer than Jagdeep wanted and his backers wanted." — Former employee #2."
"“Now, the integration value [of Speedway] is, I would say, proprietary. I can't give out a number from a competitive reason of that integration value, but I can say it is very significant...” — Gary Heminger, July 28, 2016; “So we look at the integration value [of Speedway]. We look at kind of the dis-synergy if we were to do something different with Speedway, and we still believe that it has a very strong fit in our system.” — Gary Heminger, October 27, 2016; “There have been some questions about a sale of Speedway and we have such a low tax basis in Speedway. We would find that hurdle hard to overcome...” — Gary Heminger, February 14, 2017; “The bottom line is that there is no compelling valuation opportunity in separating our retail business, and that any potential separation will cause loss of integration synergies, additional cash needed to maintain appropriate balance sheet strength, increase volatility in the remaining business, and, we believe, result in long term value disruption.” — Gary Heminger, September 5, 2017; “As part of this exploration process, MPC and Speedway negotiated a potential post-spin supply agreement. Our analysis indicates any supply agreement structured in pursuit of a tax-free spin would be market-based and arm's length. Such a conventional supply agreement would be limited in term and in volume. As a result, the supply agreement only temporarily and partially mitigates the loss of integration synergy, and the synergy value lost beyond the term of an initial supply agreement is substantial. In short, such a transaction, even with the supply agreement, would destroy significant value.” — Gary Heminger, September 5, 2017; “...we completed the very comprehensive review of Speedway and the conclusion, the unanimous conclusion by the board was that Speedway would remain in the vertical integration of MPC.” — Gary Heminger, February 13, 2018"
"“Now, the integration value [of Speedway] is, I would say, proprietary. I can't give out a number from a competitive reason of that integration value, but I can say it is very significant...” — Gary Heminger, July 28, 2016; “So we look at the integration value [of Speedway]. We look at kind of the dis-synergy if we were to do something different with Speedway, and we still believe that it has a very strong fit in our system.” — Gary Heminger, October 27, 2016; “There have been some questions about a sale of Speedway and we have such a low tax basis in Speedway. We would find that hurdle hard to overcome...” — Gary Heminger, February 14, 2017; “The bottom line is that there is no compelling valuation opportunity in separating our retail business, and that any potential separation will cause loss of integration synergies, additional cash needed to maintain appropriate balance sheet strength, increase volatility in the remaining business, and, we believe, result in long term value disruption.” — Gary Heminger, September 5, 2017; “As part of this exploration process, MPC and Speedway negotiated a potential post-spin supply agreement. Our analysis indicates any supply agreement structured in pursuit of a tax-free spin would be market-based and arm's length. Such a conventional supply agreement would be limited in term and in volume. As a result, the supply agreement only temporarily and partially mitigates the loss of integration synergy, and the synergy value lost beyond the term of an initial supply agreement is substantial. In short, such a transaction, even with the supply agreement, would destroy significant value.” — Gary Heminger, September 5, 2017; “...we completed the very comprehensive review of Speedway and the conclusion, the unanimous conclusion by the board was that Speedway would remain in the vertical integration of MPC.” — Gary Heminger, February 13, 2018"
""...with Starboard now nominating a slate of directors it has formally challenged HUN's board structure. These nominees are quite qualified in our view, and we think could be quite effective at aiding and improving the upstream, downstream, and financial footprint at the company...productivity should be a perpetual process, and additional oversight and guidance through its evolution could be helpful for a company that does not have a longstanding productivity culture." — BofA Securities, January 2022; "Mr. Gallogly carries high esteem for making money for Chemicals investors over the past 10+ years – As CEO of LyondellBasell (LYB), shares outperformed the S&P 500 by 382% and outperformed peer Dow Chemical by 357% from emerging out of bankruptcy in 2010 until Mr. Gallogly announced his retirement in late September 2014...We think he carries four main attributes that investors would welcome to the board of Huntsman (or any Chemical company for that matter): 1) operating acumen and focus on safety + cost, 2) a track record of prudent and shareholder-friendly capital discipline, 3) a reputation of being forthright and outspoken in his views, and 4) a track record of delivering on results." — Barclays, January 2022; "Importantly, we believe that Jim Gallogly stands out among the proposed Starboard nominees and the newly added board members with the potential to be especially impactful on investor confidence, and on the contribution that the refreshed board could make to the Company's bottom line and valuation. In our experience covering LyondellBasell when Mr. Gallogly was its CEO, his leadership was both evident in the Company's results and was rewarded by the equity market. We believe that a candidacy of Mr. Gallogly's caliber could greatly enhance the board, in particular in the areas of operational efficiency and cost control." — KeyBanc Capital Markets, January 2022"
""...with Starboard now nominating a slate of directors it has formally challenged HUN's board structure. These nominees are quite qualified in our view, and we think could be quite effective at aiding and improving the upstream, downstream, and financial footprint at the company...productivity should be a perpetual process, and additional oversight and guidance through its evolution could be helpful for a company that does not have a longstanding productivity culture." — BofA Securities, January 2022; "Mr. Gallogly carries high esteem for making money for Chemicals investors over the past 10+ years – As CEO of LyondellBasell (LYB), shares outperformed the S&P 500 by 382% and outperformed peer Dow Chemical by 357% from emerging out of bankruptcy in 2010 until Mr. Gallogly announced his retirement in late September 2014...We think he carries four main attributes that investors would welcome to the board of Huntsman (or any Chemical company for that matter): 1) operating acumen and focus on safety + cost, 2) a track record of prudent and shareholder-friendly capital discipline, 3) a reputation of being forthright and outspoken in his views, and 4) a track record of delivering on results." — Barclays, January 2022; "Importantly, we believe that Jim Gallogly stands out among the proposed Starboard nominees and the newly added board members with the potential to be especially impactful on investor confidence, and on the contribution that the refreshed board could make to the Company's bottom line and valuation. In our experience covering LyondellBasell when Mr. Gallogly was its CEO, his leadership was both evident in the Company's results and was rewarded by the equity market. We believe that a candidacy of Mr. Gallogly's caliber could greatly enhance the board, in particular in the areas of operational efficiency and cost control." — KeyBanc Capital Markets, January 2022"
""There were a couple of other problems with Nevro besides loss of efficacy. One, the size of battery. When you put in a huge generator like Nevro’s original device, you can’t hide it well. The other is charging it every day. It’s a burden and now you see Abbott going huge into non-rechargeable devices. Their device lasts 5-7 years. When I switch people out of Nevro or whatever into an Abbott they’re like, 'I don’t have to charge it? Are you kidding me, why didn’t we do this in the first place?' Patients don’t understand the burden of charging every day until they actually have to charge it every day. Initially people don’t mind, but after 6 months it becomes a problem." — KOL and former high volume Nevro implanter and consultant; "The problem with a 10kHz device is that battery is going to be gone in a day. You have to recharge it like your iPhone. You don’t need to do that. You can have 1kHz, and you have the same outcome. That’s been shown." — KOL and high volume implanter; "The average duration between recharges is one of the biggest detriments for high frequency. Patients are charging daily. For the older folks who struggle with technology, it’s a significant detriment. I won’t implant Nevro in folks over 60. It’s a big turn off for me and my patients." — KOL and high volume implanter; "I haven’t seen any better efficacy with 10kHz versus other frequencies. I would also say that one of the downsides of Nevro is that because of the high energy requirements, patients need to recharge very frequently and there are patient populations who may not be compliant and there’s data on that, patients don’t charge them, that the devices don’t last as long and that the patients just don’t use the device as much." — High volume implanter; "Nevro has to be charged every couple of days or every day versus others every 1 or 2 weeks." — High volume implanter"
""The separation of our two business units—ESM and MSM—at the beginning of 2007 provides sharper focus and greater accountability. And the operating and financial discipline we've instilled across our company makes us a faster, more agile, and more productive enterprise" — Bob Beauchamp (2007 Annual Report); "The organizational separation of our MSM business from our ESM business two years ago continues to pay dividends. Our offerings today are superior to the competition's and our people are energized and focused" — Bob Beauchamp (2008 Annual Report); "So over the course of Fiscal 2009, we significantly strengthened our sales force. We invested in the most complete and powerful sales training in our history. We brought in new management and sales professionals to upgrade an already strong and talented team" — Bob Beauchamp (2009 Annual Report); "We substantially upgraded our Enterprise Service Management (ESM) sales force and expect that we'll increase the average number of productive sales reps in fiscal 2011 by 20% over last year's levels" — Bob Beauchamp (2010 Annual Report); "We also strengthened our ESM sales team, achieving a 20% increase in the average productive sales headcount compared to the prior year, while significantly slowing attrition" — Bob Beauchamp (2011 Annual Report); "We made further progress to improve sales execution, including numerous steps taken to address sales attrition, and our tenured and overall ESM sales force capacity, excluding Numara, is up, finishing the year with 20% more total sales capacity than at the beginning of fiscal 2012.... The progress here is evidence of our efforts to address our well-documented fiscal 2012 challenges to improve sales force capacity and productivity, and it puts us in a much-improved position as we enter fiscal 2013" — Bob Beauchamp (Q4 and FY2012 Earnings Call on May 9, 2012)"
""So it's really a benefit to Trinity, not to Sunnova. It's very easy to give for Trinity. It's very easy to get a Sunnova exclusive." — Industry Executive; "We mostly provide financing through Sunnova, but can also offer Sunrun, Sunlight and other financing providers." — Manager, Trinity Solar; "At year-end, the total number of dealer and sub dealers who partnered with Sunnova reached 155, a 14% increase from the end of September 2019. We currently have a growing backlog of high-quality contractors, who are looking to become Sunnova dealers and an increasing number of them desire exclusivity." — CEO Sunnova, Q4 2019 Call Feb 25, 2020; "Could you discuss, actually, a bit more on the increase in exclusivity for dealers?" — BoA Analyst; "What did come as a surprise that we recently had our dealers summit, and this was something that was a pretty strong feedback. I think, look, we're adding a lot of operational capabilities to the company. And then, again, looking at our widest product portfolio, there really isn't a need. And certainly, there is a desire to cut costs by the dealers to just plug in again to one service platform. Our strong financial position, relationships, we've proven that we're focused on the dealer and the customer and service. So all that comes together is that dealers are looking to find a home. They want to be able to pick up the phone, talk to senior management if need be because things do happen on both sides of the relationship, and they know we're totally focused on them. And so that is giving a lot more comfort to folks, and you're seeing a lot of dealers talks amongst each other that are not yet Sunnova dealers and saying, you know what, you need to come over here. This is home. This is the place you want to be. This is where you can build your business over the long term." — CEO Sunnova, Q4 2019 Call Feb 25, 2020"
"Look, in the end, I think the biggest risk is the technology, whether that will function or not, and whether they're able to scale the technology at a very competitive cost. And now you have to think about, right, I've told you there is already over melting, over capacity in the market. So out of the roughly 200,000 plus metric tons that are being consumed, the melt capacity is, and the U.S. melt has just have added capacity. The melt capacity is beyond 300,000 metric tons. So you already have an excess capacity in a market. If you ask me personally from an investing, investing in a market that has over capacity, you'd really have to pick your company that really stands out. So from my personal opinion, IperionX, where right now, and I think this is what they're good at, they're good at marketing. Personally, I believe, to me it's more a marketing story right now. And that's why I say the risk is will they get their operations and be able to scale. If that, yes, it can be, but I don't really know their internal cost base and also the scalability to get up to 10,000 in a market that has very large established players. TIMET is building a new plant, that is public information and probably adding anywhere between 10 and 15 thousand tons of melt capacity. So they know what they're doing. And even for them, even though they know what they're doing and it's an already established technology, as these large industrial projects, it is hard to scale. So I think with IperionX from an investment perspective also is how can they to secure funding going forward because obviously they have costs and the revenue side, the revenue side is not there. I think these are the risks. So right now I would say it's a very speculative investment and from portfolio theory, you basically know what to do. — Industry Executive in Metals and Alloy Recycling"
""We think the most viable form of unlock would likely come via spin-off of Midstream....That said, we think it might make the most sense to not include refinery-related assets/EBITDA with the Midstream spin, given the integration with and commercial value to the company's refining business." — J.P. Morgan, February 2025; "However, when [the Company was] pressed on these points, some of the integration case fell apart, in our view. For example, management acknowledged that a midstream spin could be done tax-free." — TPH & Co, April 2025; "In our view, the potential (transformative) investment case for PSX comes down to a question of 1) the potential value uplift of a particular action, and 2) the likelihood of that action taking place. For example, on one end, the monetization of the European retail business is highly likely, but the shareholder impact is relatively modest. On the other end, a spin/sale of the Midstream business is by far the single largest source of potential value creation ($40B-$45B of proceeds at a potential multiple - 10x - that offers by far the largest multiple uplift/arbitrage), but is also the strategy to which the management has been the most strongly opposed." — Piper Sandler, February 2025; "We believe the strong valuations and ability for a standalone company to better capture growth opportunities in the sector make a Midstream spin/sale appealing, in our view." — T.D. Cowen, February 2025; "At our theoretical SOTP of $160/share (our DCF-based price objective is $147), selling some midstream assets could unlock value." — Bank of America, February 2025; "PSX is unlikely to ever receive sufficient credit for much of its marketing and midstream business...there is clearly value to be created via disposals, of which is the initial $3.0B plan is a good start." — Piper Sandler, November 2023"
"Clients have fired us because of performance -- yes, of losing clients. That's the danger, the worst thing that could happen. And so there's always, always the most stressful part as a part of the team, as a leadership team because you always want to have good client reviews. And so that's kind of what drives the performance up over time because the expectations of clients always change. And then when it's not good for a particular week, then everyone just kind of panics and does what they need to do to get it up for the next business review, which is a week later. So over time, it usually gets better or else, we get fired — Former Executive. They would leave TaskUs because we weren't able to meet the performance that they required, or usually, clients come to TaskUs, when they start off with TaskUs, TaskUs is the only vendor, and that's good for us. But then, eventually, they would want to get another vendor for business continuity purposes, right? Because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. We get fired in some cases because the new vendor outperformed us. And over a span of a certain period of time, we are not able to cope up with that. And that's when they decide to move more of the volume to that other vendor and then get a third vendor to be the business continuity site which was TaskUs before. So then like most clients always have at least one more client -- I mean, one more BPO and there's always competition between the two BPOs. Sometimes there's even more. I've had instances where there were 20 vendors but that wasn't TaskUs, it was at my previous company. We're 20 vendors, and it was really hard to keep up. As to the firing rate, for me, I was handling 11 total clients, and 2 of them, I lost. So it's about 15% or so, 10% to 15% that I lost clients. — Former Executive."
""We understand from reading their proxy statement that any continuing agreement between Elliott and their nominees will be purely executory and such nominees will not owe any duty or allegiance to Elliott. Moreover, we find that the compensation provided by Elliott to their nominees is consistent and comparable to that of the company's continuing directors; specifically, continuing directors have similar upside potential on historical share grants received during their tenure as directors. We believe Elliott's nominees and your continuing directors are all compensated in a manner consistent with their fiduciary duties to all the shareholders." — David H. Batchelder, Hess shareholder, Relational Investors LLC; "Hess has portrayed these bonuses as somehow objectionable...it is difficult to see the merit in management's arguments. The bonuses seem surgically tailored to tie the payoff to Hess's stock price performance compared to competitors. That is intended to align the interests of those directors with those of the company's shareholders. Elliott makes the promise at the outset and then has no role to play afterwards, other than to pay up if milestones are met. No one is beholden to Elliott and the independence of those directors is not compromised." — Lawrence A. Cunningham, Professor, George Washington University Law School; "The Elliott approach makes sense for Hess shareholders. It's a straightforward and objective incentive plan that clearly connects the interests of independent nominees with the interests of shareholders over the medium and long term. This kind of approach lends itself to allowing these nominees, if elected, to focus on independent decision-making and fulfilling their fiduciary obligations on behalf of shareholders." — Randall Thomas, Professor, Vanderbilt Law School"
""As I think about growth, so Keith, obviously, you guys have done a really good job driving very healthy organic growth and William and Steve have done the same thing and bolstering that with M&A and JV. So how does this change, given that you're going to go through an integration? I know you have an unlevered balance sheet and you alluded to that in your prepared remarks. But how should we be thinking about the growth profile of the combined company 6 months, 12 months and longer than that out?" — Brian Tanquilut – Jefferies. "Well, I'll go first and ask Steve to chime in with me here. Let's -- so I don't see this having, certainly, a negative effect. I mean, perhaps even accelerating the growth profile. Our balance sheet is clean. The volume of inbound calls and interest that we're getting from hospital and health system partners, in particular, is -- continues to increase. So I don't see anything that would curtail that. And we're really excited about the new growth opportunities. And Steve I'm going to let you all take that." — Keith Myers – Chairman & CEO, LHC Group. "This -- we've talked for a long time in our investor conferences in discussions around trajectory and continuing that trajectory. And both companies have been on pretty amazing trajectories. And so this is continuing the trajectory. So if you just think about Kanye West, bigger, faster, stronger, right, so we're delevering the balance sheet. This is going to be a straightforward integration.... So I think we're going to grow better and faster. I'd rather us do this together, because I think we can grow better, faster, lower risk, higher return profile doing this together than we could possibly do it separately." — C. Steven Guenthner – President, Principal Financial Officer, Treasurer & Secretary, Almost Family."
""High frequency comes with challenges. The patient doesn't get feedback from paresthesia. They either feel pain or don't. That's where the challenge comes in for Nevro. There's a whole psychological issue with paresthesia that plays into it. The patients are dependent on opioids. The device could be working, but patients say it's not working, and then the patients want opioids. Patients have to be in a mindset to be patient to be cooperative. If they had a low frequency device, they're used to making programming changes on the fly, which you can't with high frequency. Some patients are compliant. A good number are not. They just crank the device up and have more pain." — Former Nevro executive; "Nevro put together a brand new patient support and programming team. It's role was to work with patients, call the patient on a daily basis, and advise the patient to turn the stimulator on or off. It was a big organization. They would have a list of patients they were in charge of. They would call them daily during the trial, right after, after the procedure, to make sure the stim is set correctly. No other neuromodulation company had that. It was unique to HF10. A lot of times the patient had to be patient. We'd lower or increase the stimulation. We'd start at a low frequency, would wait 24 to 48 hours, would increase it by 1, then wait, then increase it again. For one algorithm, you'd spend a week and a half just on that algorithm. The reps would ask on the phone if you're getting pain coverage, take notes, then add 3 milliamps. They'd have to go through this over the next 3 to 4 weeks to get correct coverage. If they didn't get correct pain coverage, they'd have to bring the patient back in for reprogramming to see which programs work or don't work." — Former Nevro executive"
""Right now, our strategy is clear that we want to take the broadband subscribers with fixed wireless access. Because we get them right now, it's a superior product. And we don't see a need right now for adding any fiber to that footprint." — Verizon Q2 2023. "So as Mike led off with, right away, we may have been a little too optimistic with what we're seeing more in the price-conscious segment in the earlier part of the quarter in December. But the main point bringing us back up, it's intensely competitive in all segments. So it's little bit of a shift, but it's -- you have fixed wireless, while it's leveled, they're still out there aggressively marketing, and you got fiber that's overbuilding. So that has continued." — Comcast Jan 30, 2025. "We literally just launched this quarter our new AT&T business, fixed wireless product. And our goal is, it's a nationwide launch. We think it's a great product for small- to medium-sized businesses done with consumption patterns of home where you're playing video games or watching video. We think it's a great solution in that regard. And while it's early, the initial reception has been really good on that. And I think over time, that would be one of the growth vectors for our enterprise business." — AT&T June 11, 2024. "Often, FWA is referred to as an alternative to fiber and hybrid-fiber coaxial (HFC) networks with the implication being that FWA is inferior to those wired options because FWA cannot provide the same level of throughput and/or capacity. But it is also now clear that FWA can support households using hundreds of GBs per month. FWA has proven it has a valid role to play in the U.S. broadband market and can meet the needs of millions of consumers and businesses." — Wireless Infrastructure Association October 2024."
"[Avon's] apparent lack of succession planning is 'an extraordinary indictment of the board,' said Mark Cohen, professor at Columbia Business School and former CEO of Sears Canada. — Reuters article titled 'Avon needs bold change as Jung's CEO tenure ends,' 12/14/11. [Coca-Cola] has landed a new chief executive after a search so remarkable that another Fortune CEO, A.G. Lafley of P&G, calls it 'one of the strangest processes we've ever seen.'... [I]t has become a case study in business dysfunction. — CNN Money article titled 'The Real Story: How did Coca-Cola's management go from first-rate to farcical in six short years? Tommy the barber knows,' 05/31/04. It's a tale of how good intentions clashed with hubris and ego can erode one of the most famous organizations in the world — a case study in corporate dysfunction and succession gone wrong. As Iger and the Disney board resume their search for a successor, a critical question looms: Have they learned the moral of the story? — CNBC article titled 'Disney's wild ride: Iger, Chapek and the making of an epic succession mess,' 09/06/23. Mondelez International's orderly succession planning is sweet inspiration... Others would do well to emulate the process... — Barclays research note, 07/29/21. Mr. Moeller has been front and center in P&G's turnaround over the past decade, [and] this announcement ensures continuity of a strategy that has already been working well... — Barclays research note, 01/30/23. [Hein] must have done a good job impressing the board with his vision for the company... [And] as we have seen many times before, unexpected hires can turn out to be very good... Dirk Van de Put is another excellent CEO who is now [at] Mondelez but who also came out of left field... — Barclays research note, 01/30/23."
"We reviewed your firm's response and concluded that it is not adequate. Your response states that your firm's process about when to escalate a CAPA to an HHE [health hazard evaluation] was not clear. As such, CAPA procedural updates were made, and training was performed. Specifically, you updated your CAPA to include the statement, "The issue will be assessed... [in accordance with the Health Hazard Evaluation Procedure], to determine if the criteria for an HHE has been met, and whether field action is required." Your firm also conducted an HHE for the Activation Time Mismatch error, as required by your CAPA procedures. In addition, your firm conducted several other HHEs. It is important that the HHE be performed in accordance with your firm's Risk Management SOP (00010) because the outcome of the HHE is used to determine some of your firm's corrective and/or preventative actions. However, based on FDA's own calculations, these HHEs do not appear to be conducted in accordance with your Risk Management SOP (SOP0010). For example, when conducting HHE-[redacted], it appears your firm failed to properly calculate the probability of occurrence of the potential safety issue. Your miscalculation underestimated the likelihood of someone being injured. According to your updated CAPA procedure, the difference in the occurrence rating for HHE-[redacted] would have required an update to your risk documentation and the HHE shows that this was not selected. Further, when conducting HHE-[redacted], your firm failed to apply the Health Risk Table in your Risk Management SOP (SOP0010). This miscalculation is significant because this HHE procedure is used to assess whether or not you will initiate field action. — FDA Warning Letter Dated 5/25/23 (CMS 643474)"
""On the topic of innovation, on dairy cmon, there's not a lot of innovation. On the cheese side there's a little more. But, the big push and where they made a big investment is in the plant-based foods and cheeses. They had some lofty goals for the business to achieve. We had a hard time wrapping our heads around how these goals would be met. Quite frankly, who likes the product? They have a substantial plan for retail and are pushing hard, but I think the sales team is struggling." — Former Saputo Executive; "Nobody knows the Saputo name unless you're in the business. To me that hurts them on the retail side. They were trying to do brand consolidation. They have tons of brands you've never heard. They had private label brands for stores, and some didn't make sense for the volumes. The joke at Saputo was we're going to fill you 100%, 50% of the time. I don't know if the production issues have gotten better. Labor has been an issue." — Former Saputo Executive; "Yes, it will be disruptive to Saputo. They're closer to Saputo's New Mexico footprint. Leprino makes good cheese. I do think it's going to be a problem for Saputo, especially in the Texas area." — Former Saputo Executive; "In terms of the strategic priorities and stimulating organic revenue growth, they have no advantage over anyone. Their biggest brand is Saputo Gold mozzarella, it's their best product. I just don't see it. It's not going to happen in the plant-based business. I can't think of any product differentiator for Saputo on the cheese side. The hardest thing for Saputo is to grow the business. Again, they are logistically challenged. Just to get volume on some of the mozzarella, there was almost no margin. The plants have to keep running." — Former Saputo Executive"
""This whole story where they’re going to photonically interconnect chambers to grow the device, I have real problems with. Think about I need to get to 1000 qubits. So, I’m going to interconnect what? Fifty or 100 of these 40-qubit chambers? And what’s going to happen to errors, and what’s going to happen to connectivity? I just don’t think it’s a good solution. Their ability to scale, I just don’t believe." — Former executive; "The question is, how do I connect qubits in module A to qubits in module B? Because you have to do it with as high fidelity or else your module to module connection is your choke point. That’s the weak link. So, that is the major challenge that I see with the IonQ approach [...] But how do you connect modules together so that you have an extensible or scalable quantum system. They have talked publicly about some ideas to do that [...] But the fidelities with which they can do that today, at least what I’ve seen in the public domain, have not been that high." — Leading quantum computing scientist and longtime friend of both co-founders; "The approach IonQ does is they want to build multiple individual smaller traps and then connect them by fiber optics. They haven’t shown in principle that it works and that now it’s an engineering problem. The second problem is just adding more ions or qubits is not the hardest part. The hardest part is really making them behave in a quantum way and that they keep all of their properties as we try to scale up and going to bigger and bigger systems [...] Their roadmap is with these multiple traps to interconnect them. I personally am not super-convinced about that approach. I think that’s their biggest drawback." — IBM quantum computing researcher with expertise in ion-traps"
""At the time of the initial deal announcement, our estimated fair value was around ¥20,000 per share. Over the last six months fair value has increased and we believe it could be upwards of ¥25,000 per share [...] How they arrived at the new valuation level is still unclear, especially as the wider market looks to have a significantly higher fair value estimate [...]" — Nicola Takada Wood, AVI, January 16, 2026; "Toyota is trying to acquire Toyota Industries on the cheap [...]" — Hugh Sloane, Sloane Robinson Investment Management, January 15, 2026; "I think the business environment has actually improved, the share prices of your competitors have risen, the tariff environment has improved, so I would have thought the value of the underlying business would also have gone up since 3 Jun. [...] The value of the cross-shareholdings has objectively risen by 5,300 per share, I don't think we need external valuations for that." — Christopher Davis, Mondrian Investment Partners, January 14, 2026; "The minimum acceptance condition will be hard to reach and as such an increase in the offer terms is likely. The uplift in subsidiary share buyback prices provides a benchmark for the increase to the tender offer price which would imply ¥21,000/share." — United First Partners, January 20, 2026; "This higher offer is almost worse than the original given that Toyota Industries' group shareholdings are worth ¥5,300 per share more now than they were in June [...]" — Stephen Codrington, Codrington Japan, January 14, 2026; "My strong sense from talking to indignant TICO shareholders [...] is that the 15% uplift has not changed their intentions and that in their eyes the ¥18,800 bid remains woefully inadequate." — CLSA (John Seagrim), January 15, 2026"
""The company is at a key inflection point and we cannot afford to let the Board and management be diverted from our progress and plan by creating a dysfunctional and destabilizing environment." — Heinz, June 2006; "Trian has chosen this path [a proxy contest] with the potential to disrupt our Company at a key stage of execution against our plan" — DuPont Press Release, Jan 2015; "[P&G] is in the best position to continue building a better Company without adding Mr. Peltz to the Board...Now is the time to focus on accelerating results, and prevent anything from derailing the work that is delivering improvement." — David Taylor, P&G CEO August 1, 2017; "I said to another CEO...who had called me and inquired about Nelson, that if I were to form the board today, Nelson would be one of the first Directors I'd ask to serve because he is an insightful, communicative, enthusiastic, energetic and available Director." — Bill Johnson, Heinz CEO, March 2008; "I have the highest regard for Nelson Peltz and Ed Garden. Since becoming CEO of DuPont, I have talked many times with the Trian team and appreciate their insights on strategy and operations, as well as the collaborative and productive manner in which they have engaged with us." — Ed Breen, DuPont CEO, July 2017; "From day one, Nelson has been a focused, collaborative member of P&G's Board. Working in concert, Nelson and the Board have constructively provided perspective and expertise to help me and P&G's senior leaders navigate a challenging external environment and maintain long-term competitive advantage for the benefit of many stakeholders. I'm grateful for his service and the collaborative partnership we've developed over the past few years..." — David Taylor, P&G CEO, Aug 2021"
""I don't think Momo will be a long lasting platform as its reputation is not good. In most people's experience it is a live cam site for sex and this is something it cannot wash off." — Small Exclusive Agent #2; "Momo is good for publicity. Most people think of Momo as a sex site which has predominantly male users." — Super Agency #6; "A successful broadcaster on Yizhibo would not survive on Momo. Momo is low level. Momo was successful because it was like a porn cam channel. The users were 30 to 50 year old males in second and third tier cities. Their motives were clear. They wanted to see sex performances. Despite being cleaned up Momo is still this sort of channel and encourages people to climax. If Momo can not change directions then it will have a problem." — Small Agency #9; "90% of the audience are male. They are not interested in art but more about sex. Older men with their families in the US. They are lonely and spend a lot of money each month." — Large Agency #11; "There are lots of new restrictions like you cannot show breast area, 2/3 of the breast area must be covered. If you wear a short skirt you cannot drop things. You cannot broadcast lying in bed. There are broadcasters breaking all of these rules. Momo does not try to clean it up unless they are caught because they want the traffic and the money. We do not have that sort of broadcaster on our roster." — Small Agency #9; "Last year was a revolutionary year for our industry. This year is a difficult year. There are more regulatory restrictions on the industry. Some popular broadcasters have been kicked out. They were on the edge of regulations and using words and actions they should not use. There are a lot of restrictions on clothing now." — Large Agency #6"
"I think the world of the Phillips 66 refining employees, and I would love the opportunity to become a part of Phillips 66 again in a board role... — Brian Coffman, former CEO, Motiva, Elliott nominee for Phillips 66's board, April 8, 2025; This is a company that has good people, has a rich history, and great assets that don't necessarily belong together. — Sig Cornelius, former ConocoPhillips CFO, Elliott nominee for Phillips 66's board, April 22, 2025; Phillips 66 is a wonderful company with fantastic assets. And if we can change the corporate structure and unlock value, then I think that actually frees up every operation as a pure play... — Stacy Nieuwoudt, former energy and industrials analyst, Citadel, Elliott nominee for Phillips 66's board, April 15, 2025; They've got some of the best people that have been handcuffed and not allowed to succeed. — Mike Heim, co-founder of Targa Resources, Elliott nominee for Phillips 66's board, April 30, 2025; So, you've just got to give them the opportunity to spread their wings, go back out and repair a decade of damage or two decades of damage...and start to build the company again. — Mike Heim, co-founder of Targa Resources, Elliott nominee for Phillips 66's board, April 30, 2025; ...There is a pent-up frustration, but also pent-up creativity and excitement of the employee base [at companies like Phillips 66] that is just waiting to be unleashed. — John Pike, Elliott partner, head of global energy practice, May 15, 2025; We want to see this business [Phillips 66] thrive, and it would be our expectation that your career, your wealth, your sense of satisfaction at work would also thrive alongside of that. — Geoff Sorbello, Elliott's managing director of engagement, May 15, 2025"
""Management's initial announcement on asset sales and increased payouts to shareholders, while significant, appeared to undershoot the high expectations that had buoyed the share price at the start of the year" — Border to Coast. "Keisei initially announced it would sell 1% of its OLC stake, which disappointed the market. The value of the OLC stake has different meanings for different shareholders of Keisei; however, if it continues this path, they can unlock capital to fund growth in capex or return funds to shareholders." — MFS Investment Management. "In our view, Keisei Electric Railway is a discounted asset with the potential to unlock significant value by reducing its 20% stake in Oriental Land." — Franklin Templeton. "We also expect the company to monetize its 20% stake in Oriental Land, which equals Keisei's entire enterprise value" — Boston Common Asset Management. "The entire market capitalization of Keisei is $6.6bn, and they've got this $8bn post-tax investment sitting there. On top of that you're also getting this profitable rail business thrown in there basically for free." — Fidelity International. "The Fund considers that the valuation [of Keisei Electric Railway] is extremely inaccurate." — Sparx Japan Small-Cap Fund. "...it's remarkable that Keisei Electric trades at about a 50% discount to the value of that stake in Oriental Land, as well as the value of the land and the railway line business as well." — AVI Asset Value Investors. "Keisei Railways ... have significant latent value hidden in net cash or cross-holdings. Through the efforts of both ourselves and others, we believe this value has a strong chance of being unlocked amidst this new atmosphere of reform in Japan." — M&G Investments."