4DS Memory (ASX: 4DS) shares are down 29% today. Which isn’t how the Chairman’s address is normally greeted, not unless he reveals some terror of nastiness in it. And to be fair, 4DS hasn’t lreased some chunk of bad news. Quite the opposite in fact, they’ve given an update on their development process, noted that they development contracts are looking fine, they’re funded and so on. So, quite why the drop is unknown. It’s possible to think just that the 4DS share price is febrile, which it is, so mere changes in market opinion can have large effects. It’s also possible to think that a bit too much hope was being built into that price.
The announcement: “Yesterday, we announced the renewal of the imec agreement for 2024 and plan to expend additional money to ensure we have two platform manufacturing slots for 2024 and importantly work on both 60nm and 20nm memory cells in 2024. In line with what we hope will be a very successful 2024 we have appointed a Board strategic advisor and welcome Peter Himes to the Company. The megabit array results have been a turning point for the Company and will now shape the Board’s strategic planning with the assistance of Peter. Financially the Company is in a very strong position. In March this year the Company successfully completed a Placement for $5.5 million at an issue price of $0.036 cents per share..” and so on. Even reading to the end there’s no bad news there. At the AGM all the motions were carried.
4DS Memory share price from Google Finance
We have talked before about 4DS Memory: “4DS Memory (ASX: 4DS) (OTCPK: FRDSF) shares are up 90% today. 4DS shares are up because they’ve announced that their new memory tech seems to actually work. Work in the engineering sense that is, not in the lab sense. Yes, this all gets a bit technical and those of us not wholly au fait with the terms can get a bit lost here. But the essential point is that there are lots of things that work on a lab bench. But which are either very difficult or even impossible to transfer to a large scale production run. If you can’t make the whatever it is at scale then of course you can’t really sell it at scale either. This is the problem 4DS has been facing with its memory and the announcement today is that they seem to have overcome this. Or, to be ever more precise, that’s how the market is taking this announcement.”
That was back in August, at the beginning of that share price rise. The road map for the near future includes two more iterations of experimentation - two more lots of chips made. It might be that which is causing the price decline. Hopes that there would actually be sales in this near future rather than further testing. As ever, it’s entirely possible for the hopes embedded in a share price to get ahead of reality.
