I was wrong about an announcement on progress during July. It is pretty disappointing that AP management see fit to provide no follow up to the expectations they fanned with their last AGM announcement:
" ... Most significantly the production of reliably functioning devices has finally enabled the company to progress to the acoustic development phase of the product. While the results attained so far appear promising, we are at the very early stages of this step. Efforts to recover from the slight setback are well underway and we expect acoustic testing and validation to resume in full force within the coming weeks."
• Acoustic characterization began but was interrupted by prober crash that was a result of a PC freezing at the least opportune moment. • Fabricator expediting immediate backup wafers to replace broken wafer, as well as advancing backup wafer batches. • In the interim we continued acoustic characterization using other variants from that wafer batch.
As I said in my earlier post I would have expected that in the clear light of these statements that any bad news would need to be signalled to the market as it would need to be considered to be price sensitive (and it is certainly likely to be). The broken wafer was a slight setback. More wafers from the same batch were supposedly immediately available. Continued characterisation was in progress. We were encouraged by this careful wording to think that within a very brief period the testing would continue from where it left off and we would hear something positive. Anything beyond this in terms of bad news changes the situation significantly. However it is feasible to believe that this has all happened as indicated and that 'acoustic testing and validation has resumed in full force over the following weeks'.
But I guess it has to be read that it is in that light that AP's typically inadequate level of communication with its loyal shareholder base is just a frustration we have to bear.
In its absence we can be confident that there is no bad news, surely!? Therefore there is no news yet.
In previous years we have had a progress report towards the end of August along with the half year accounts. I expect AP management thinks that we will not all turn blue from holding our breaths for almost a full quarter!
(20min delay)