Will Ascent Solar Technologies, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ASTI) Stop Crashing?
The stock of Ascent Technologies, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ASTI) has been sliding down the chart for quite a while now but the last three trading sessions have been particularly painful. Yesterday the ticker closed with a loss of nearly 20% at $0.02065. During the session a new 52-week low of $0.2 was registered.
The PRs coming from the company and the recently filed quarterly report weren’t even able to slow down the devastating downtrend of the stock. Let’s start with the PR – on Monday ASTI announced that it has expanded its European retail footprint by adding 95 Robert Dyas locations in the United Kingdom. This means that the company’s EnerPlex line of products is now available in 280 retail stores in the UK. As we said, however, investors were far from thrilled by the news and on that day ASTI crashed by more than 16%.
What about the financial report? According to it as of March 31, 2016, ASTI had:
• $350 thousand cash
• $9.7 million total current assets
• $15.1 million total current liabilities
• $710 thousand revenues
• $10.5 million net loss
Despite the over 40% reduction of the net loss on a year-over-year basis and the 8% growth in the reported revenues the balance sheet has remained far from encouraging.
Another major factor that is undoubtedly playing its part in pushing the stock down the chart is the sheer amount of fresh shares that are being issued by the company. ASTI‘s shareholder have been simply drowned in dilution with the outstanding shares growing from 18 million at the start of 2015 to 155 million at the end of the year. The quarterly report revealed that the O/S is still growing at a staggering pace – as of May 11 there were 294 million outstanding shares.
At the end of April ASTI were able to acquire $2 million through a private placement of the company’s newly designated Series G preferred shares. These shares have a fixed conversion price of $0.05, which means that at least for now their owners are unlikely to turn them into common shares.
In early trading today ASTI is sitting around 2.4% in the green at $0.0212.
