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In a way you're right, but we should also take their payment schedule into account. They used to pay 15 days after the end of the month. That means they were a
by grujicd 2y ago
In a way you're right, but we should also take their payment schedule into account. They used to pay 15 days after the end of the month.
That means they were at most taking a half of future month for "ponzi buffer". Couldn't be more than that, if we assume they were not accruing debt. Which they most probably did, but for the sake of high-level analysis we could assume they were at zero.
They're now all of a sudden sitting on a July, August, and in most cases good piece of September sales. They basically went from 15 days of "extra ponzi buffer" to 45 day. If we include July, which they also didn't pay - they're now sitting on 75 day of revenue. That's quite the extra money compared with extra buffer they were operating with until recently, depending on how we look - 5 times more.
We should also take into account that MyCommerce margin is between 5 and 10%, depending on order size and how much of currency exchange they take. So their operating expenses should be around that. Even if they lost some big clients and let's say lost half of the sales, their expenses should went from 10% to a 20% of a single month. But they're sitting on full 2.5 months of now, 25 times more than their typical expenses.
Something is way off, that can't be explained with gradual slip into ponzi scheme.
One explanation was that Kaspersky was so big for them, it made 90% of sales. When they left the platform, their operating expenses went from 10% to 100% (using napkin math, we're only guessing anyway).
However, since they had a huge layoff in July I assume they're adjusting their expenses to the loss of such a big client. Layoff in US was without severance, based on reports. Since they continued collecting money from other vendors, and not paying them, and considering that they accumulated multiple months of full revenue compared to the usual 5-10% of a single month they should still have MUCH more money at hand.
It's very likely that they're transferring that money to another entity. Perhaps paying off a big creditor, which might be legal, but they intentionally picked to pay off one single creditor with big legal team instead of hundreds (thousands?) small defenseless vendors. And they lied to these small vendors to make them stay a bit more and siphon some more money for that other party.
In essence, they told us to stay with them and bring them more sales which at that point they were already planning to send to another party. This very much looks like a fraud and theft.
- kijin 2y agoKaspersky could very well be their big creditor, if it really made up such a huge percentage of their sales. Assume, for illustration purposes, that they had a monthly revenue of $10M, of which $7M was Kaspersky sales. 15 days after their last month with Kaspersky, they need to pay Kaspersky $7M (minus fees), as well as $3M (minus fees) to their other merchants. But now they're only making $3M a month. Whatever payment schedule they can get Kaspersky to agree to, they still don't have enough money left to pay their other merchants. Of course every company should save up for a rainy day, especially if they are exposed to this kind of risk. Unfortunately, many companies don't, either out of incompetence or out of malice -- which tend to become indistinguishable at these scales.