Strategy in TECH...
After years of driving the economy, Big Tech has suddenly hit a rough road. By now you’ve likely heard about layoffs in tech…lots and lots of layoffs. According to Layoffs.fyi, as of this writing, more than 104,000 tech jobs have been lost in just the first six weeks of 2023. But what is behind the struggles of these Big Tech players?
AAMP Global announced today that Alex Camara, CEO of AudioControl for the last decade, will leave the company “to pursue new opportunities.” This change in Camara’s status will be effective on March 1, 2023.
Wall Street can be a fickle partner sometimes. Occasionally, a company will turn in a good performance, but its stock value will decline anyway because the performance wasn’t as good as financial analysts had expected. And sometimes, as is the case this time with Sonos’ fiscal 2023 first quarter results, you can turn in poor performance, and your stock value can take off flying – because this time, your performance was not good, but not as bad as the financial analysts had expected.
Sonance announced this week that it has appointed well-known manufacturer sales representative firm Strateres as its representative for the New England region. This agreement includes the representation of all of the company’s brands, including Sonance, James Loudspeaker, and IPORT.
WiSA Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: WISA) has been on a wild and rocky ride over the last few days as it scrambled to head off a delisting action by the Nasdaq stock exchange designed to force its stock listing off the exchange. At issue, the company’s business struggles that contributed to its declining stock bid prices have put it in violation of specific exchange rules governing maintained minimum pricing levels. This led the exchange to begin the delisting process, which WiSA appealed in order to buy itself some time.
The company then quickly embarked on a strategy – a mad dash really – to inflate its stock price artificially via a reverse stock split. But this tactic appears to have failed to impress investors, causing its stock bid price to collapse like an out-of-control toboggan ride down a cliff.
Multiple reports are pouring in that Snap One, a leading custom integration supplier, has just completed a restructuring that resulted in layoffs. It is not clear at this point just how many employees were cut, but it was significant enough to motivate several sources around the country to reach out to Strata-gee.
The trials and travails of WiSA Technologies (NASDAQ: WISA) appear to be continuing, if not accelerating, as the company said it has received a new notification from the Nasdaq stock exchange informing the company that its stock has violated yet another rule of the exchange, triggering a new instant delisting process. And this all took place in the wake of it just having won an additional 180-day extension period to try and cure a previous violation of a different rule from 2022. So what happens now?
Just one day after I posted the story Tech Takes a Turn…Downwards, we learned of more layoffs hitting tech, including Google parent Alphabet, Spotify, Vox Media, and more. These additional reports of even more tech layoffs only help to affirm the reality of a slowdown hitting big tech and other areas that are adjacent to tech, such as media focused on tech.
After several years of dizzying growth, the technology sector is now experiencing a notable downturn, as the post-COVID era has brought a combination of higher prices (inflation) and lower demand. In response, 2022 saw significant job cuts at major Big Tech brands that have continued on into 2023. That includes this Wednesday when Microsoft announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs – after a 1,000 job cut in October 2022 – another big blow to Tech.
But what about the more specific segments like consumer electronics and custom integration?
Sonance announced today that it has made tremendous progress in building out its new company-direct sales structure for the residential channel in Canada. Within days of launching the shift away from a national distributor based approach to an HQ-driven network, the company says it has already signed up multiple new manufacturer sales representative firms in key Canadian regions.
