Avid Technology, Inc. (AVID), maker of Pro Tools and other professional media systems, has announced that the company received a letter from NASDAQ stating that the Company is no longer in compliance with NASDAQ rules, which require timely filing of periodic reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The letter could serve as a basis for the delisting of the Company’s stock from the NASDAQ Global Select Market.
The move is a result of Avid’s Feb 25th announcement that it was indefinitely delaying fourth quarter 2012 earnings release and investor conference call, to provide time for the Company to evaluate its accounting procedures. Avid says that its primary focus has been to determine whether certain Software Updates previously thought to be only bug fixes met the definition of post-contract customer support under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
Avid says that it intends to submit a plan as to how it plans to regain compliance with NASDAQ’s listing requirements. The NASDAQ notice specifies that this plan has to be submitted by May 20, 2013. If the Staff accepts the Company’s plan, the Company expects to have up to 180 calendar days from the initial due date for the Form 10-K, or until September 16, 2013, to regain compliance.
While the announcement is the latest in a string of bad news for the company, Avid says it plans to continue to invest in its products; that it has no debt and ample cash to support it in these efforts; and that it is well positioned to support its customers’ ongoing success.
Well there’s a surprise. Sell crap hardware at top dollar and in a short time you lose your business. Too many MBA’s in Avid and not enough MSc’s.
That’s a pretty bleak chart!
first comes the warning letter from Nasdaq. then all those phone
calls trying to collect. then the repo man… sooo annoying!
I feel pain
Just my two cents–but Avid hasn’t been well positioned to support its customers for some time now. Pro Tools is great, but Avid’s business procedures have never made sense to me.
Thanks to their nonsensical business procedures, I was able to pick up a pair of DSM-3 monitors new at $1000 the pair.
Thanks to them, M-Audio is no longer in compliance with customer satisfaction rules. I’ve never seen a company’s service go down from that good to that bad.
I agree with the M audio comment, at one point I had a Delta soundcard, Midisport interface and a keystation Pro 88 key keyboard. All gone bar the soundcard and that is going, due to poor customer support.
Brick enough five-figure systems over a long enough time and this is what happens. If 10 was 64bit they might have squeaked it out, but for an extremely long time they have cared only about share price and not about long-term customer satisfaction/ loyalty. They are no longer the only game in town.
I got ProTools in 1998, and they haven’t supported me ever. Even under Digidesign, I had to pay $30 to talk to someone.
In 2005, after my first two interfaces bit the dust, I bought an M-Audio 410 and tried a few other DAWs, but then Avid acquired M-Audio and I was sucked back into ProTools.
Of course, I was forced to pay full price for another version of ProTools, and this one was buggy! Their hardware support was dismal, which I’m guessing is why they dropped M-Audio line, instead of fixing it.
Now I’ve got 12 years of ProTools sessions to export (and the export options don’t work) one track at a time, in real time. Its going to take me about two years to get all this into Logic. Ughh!!!
@Alien André
Stories like this make my glad I never bought anything Digi/Avid (ok, except the Venom I got in December, but for $200, WTF). They always seemed more trouble than they were worth dealing with, between the terrible support stories, having to worry about whether it was ok to update anything on your computer, not to mention the $$$$. I jumped into Logic when Apple bought it and I think given the $200 App Store price, anyone would be silly not to buy it if they weren’t *really* happy with their current DAW.
My experience w/ Avid (Digidiesign) goes back to ’97 from the retail side, worked for a firm that at that time was one a leading ProTools seller in North America for them. In ’99 I transitioned to being a customer of their highest end stuff (at that time MIX24 systems) and again spent a ton of money getting into the HD systems in 2002 – had decent customer service, but I was dealing with relationships that had good pull from Avid. I had friends that worked for M-Audio prior to the Avid buyout, and following the buyout (2004) all of M-Audio’s engineering support (drivers, etc) and customer support went to hell. During that same period Digidesign’s customer support got ugly. I had always been a Logic user in addition to ProTools, and phased out everything Digidiesign related that wasn’t necessary for my business. I keep a copy of PT around to open sessions brought in from other studios, but I couldn’t afford to drop $10k every time Avid decided to jerk the Keeping Up With The Jonses game. Every working studio I have to interface is still running Digi HD I/O’s, but guys are getting tired of the plug-in protocol changes. I’m curious as to what’s losing money for them – video or audio… My guess is that there’s definitely a business in ProTools, but it probably looks a lot niche-ier than Avid’s prepared to deal with.