Bobby Melnick - Terrier Partners
Analyst · Bobby Melnick from Terrier Partners. Please proceed
Thank you. It's Bobby Melnick with Terrier Partners. I wondered if we could shift a little bit to more strategic question. You're kind of an unusual smaller micro cap company here and so far as your results have been exemplary. You're profitable, cash flow positive, very liquid balance sheet, very moderate, principal and contractual obligations. You've articulated in past very publicly a desire to grow the company through acquisitions, and that there are lot of opportunities out there, you've had a good successful track record in integrating acquisition in the past. My question is a strategic one, which is how do you assess really tumultuous or unprecedented without sounding dramatic changes that have occurred in the credit environment and in the valuation environment if you will? In other words, even a company with your results certainly hasn't avoided the down draft your stock has been cut half in the last two months as have many, many, many companies both within and outside your industry. So, as you sit there with this liquid balance sheet with an express strategy of growing via acquisitions, do you landscape and say, we are better off playing caution here and waiting to see how this unfolds? Do you say, now is an opportunity to repurchase our shares? According to your Q this may prove to be fortuitous since your equity is not trading two-thirds of the value? Or do you say, now is really a once-in-a-two-decade or a decade opportunity for the corroboration to go out and maybe acquire companies that have equally seen their valuations decline? As you look across the landscape, whatever valuation parameters you had had prior to the downdraft; in other words, if you're prepared to pay an 'X' multiple of cash flow, are you still prepared to do that for acquisitions and incur some dilution? Or are you saying the equities that we are looking at, if they are public equities, we're trading at nine times cash flow now or they're trading six times cash flow, five times cash flow, and we're going to come in and try and buy them seven, eight times cash flow? So, I think you understand the gist of my question. How do you strategically assess what has happened and weigh that vis-à-vis your strategic objectives? Thanks.