Ann: Redflow enters Voluntary Administration, page-136

Bad thing. Definitely a bad thing.

Yes, it generates more sales in the short term. But it also means that those sales become a ticking warranty time bomb. The right thing for the company to do would have been to call a stop to sales, refund deposits to waiting customers, explain the situation to existing customers, and try to get shareholder support for figuring out and fixing the problem, properly.

Would it have meant an earlier end to the company? Possibly. But it would also have meant much less needless burning of shareholder capital, and it could have meant the problems being resolved and the company come out with a robust product.

The question then becomes: were management trying to build a sustainable company for the long haul, or just milk shareholders for whatever they could get? If the former, the path I posit would have been a far better choice. If the latter, the path they ended up choosing works better in the short term (but long term reputational damage means that it becomes harder to play that game again.)

The kindest spin I can put on management's choices was a hope - vain, in the end - that they could figure out the problem quietly and shuffle out the fix to existing customers as necessary. But that just resulted in an increasing number of failures, and hence a increasing liability for warranty and buybacks, and only made the demise inevitable. The number of failure reports that are coming out (at least partially in the Facebook group@SimonGr shared; possibly more - I'll have to chat with the guys with Everest Energy next time I see them [planning on a second inverter and more battery modules, for a number of reasons]) suggests that the problem just became too big for management to deal with, and that's down to the decision to try to trade out of the problem, instead of stopping to fix it properly.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just a starry eyed idealist who believes in doing things properly rather than kludging them and hoping it'll all work out in the end (though I'll acknowledge I've done - reluctantly - my share of kludges in my time.)