WANDISCO PLC (lon:wand)
WanDisco – Very Bad H1, But I Don’t Understand The Company Anyway

My attention is frequently drawn to Wandisco as their share price is quite volatile, but each time I look at them I don’t go any further because I can’t really pin down what it is they actually do.

Keep your data consistent across multiple cloud environments is the strap line on their web site and at a very high level it seems to make some form of sense.

It’s when you try and get into the details that it gets very confusing and buying shares in a company that you have no idea about is pretty tricky, after all everyone else may be equally confused and just trading on trends and recent good and bad news.

The Cloud is still a buzz word, but my experiences with it have not been as positive as might be expected, costs can very quickly run out of control and “half and half” solutions where you have some data in the cloud and some within the business can be very difficult to use.

A lot of this can be put aside if the company is profitable, but if you are a partner providing a service on top of someone else’s service then your product needs to keep up with theirs. This can be a massive cash drain especially if you are the smaller partner and given that cloud services are only offered by the really big boys then their partners will nearly always be smaller.

Revenue seems to have hit a bit of a plateau at around $15-$20 million a year with losses and share placings cancelling each other out.

I don’t know if the products are good or not, but the 2018 annual report said the company had 148 employees, this both a lot to pay but probably not enough to come up with something startling.

Given that the company is no longer a start-up I am having difficulty seeing the upside for me, trade volumes are very low, so even trading on days where there is good news may be risky leaving you trapped in the company.