QualMark Corporation (OTCMKTS:QMRK) Rises From the Ashes
Can you guess how much dollar volume QualMark Corporation (OTCMKTS:QMRK) generated during the first ten months of 2015? $1 million? $10 million? $20 million? No, you’re quite wrong. In a matter of ten full months, QMRK actually managed to rack up a cumulative volume of just $75 thousand. That’s not really much of a surprise.
The company filed its latest financial report seven years ago. No, that’s not a typo. The most recent statement really does cover the year ended December 2007 and it was issued in March 2008. Shortly after, QMRK‘s management team decided that maintaining a registration with the SEC simply isn’t worth the expense and the stock was de-listed from the OTCQB tier.
The people at the helm said that they’ll do what they can to keep the company listed on the pink sheets, but they made no efforts to continue filing under the alternative reporting standards. At the moment, if you want any sort of financial information, you can request it through a form on the company website that asks you to disclose quite a lot of information about yourself. Once you do, your request will be forwarded to “the appropriate department” and after two business days, you might actually get to see some figures.
Yesterday, retail investors decided not to wait for two business days. Instead, they scrambled for shares and they pushed QMRK in a wild run that came to an end when the closing bell stopped the ticker at $0.80 per share (a whopping 515% in the green). The dollar volume stood at $745 thousand which, as the more observant among you have noticed, is almost ten times what the company generated between January and November.
The reason for all the excitement is a press release which, curiously enough, didn’t appear on the traditional PR wires. It’s only available on the company website and it informs us that QMRK will be acquired by a Japanese entity called ESPEC Corp. The transactions is estimated at $12.5 million and QMRK‘s shareholders are expected to receive between $0.94 and $1.02 per share.
Considering the eery silence that has surrounded QMRK over the recent years, this new merger almost seems too good to be true. It does appear to be true, though. Or at least it will be if everything goes according to plan and the two companies close the acquisition before the end of the year as they intend to.
ESPEC issued a press release of their own which confirmed the validity of QMRK‘s announcement and they also included some more information on their future subsidiary. The PR says that at the end of last year QualMark had $10 million in assets, $13.2 million in sales, and a net income of about $363 thousand.
Apparently, ESPEC reckon that the results are good enough and the people who jumped in yesterday should hope that they don’t change their mind over the next month and a half. If that happens, QMRK could be in for quite a drop.
