"We're going through a little bit of a tough time now," says Raimondi, who notes that MTI has plenty of company in that department, due to the overall market slowdown. "We've swallowed some bitter pills, but we have no debt, a reasonable amount of cash, and a blue-chip customer base. As our business gets better, our financials will improve."
Right now, however, there's not much good news on MTI's business. It's still recovering from the collapse of the dotcom economy, which provided most of MTI's growth in 1999 and 2000. By supplying "some of the biggest e-tailers," as Raimondi says, MTI's stock rode to an all-time high of more than $52 per share in early 2000. But since then the stock, along with the company's business, has been in a steady decline, which Raimondi says takes time to reverse.
"We took a pretty massive hit" with the dotcom collapse, he says. "You don't replace that kind of revenue overnight."
The new goal, Raimondi says, is to focus on finding more large-enterprise customers, to join the company's current list of users that includes Alcatel SA (NYSE: ALA; Paris: CGEP:PA), Digex Inc. (Nasdaq: DIGX), and DoubleClick (Nasdaq: DCLK), among others. However, MTI faces increased pricing competition in that arena from large players like EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP).
"MTI is in for some rough times," says Brian Riggs, an analyst with research house Current Analysis. Though Riggs praises MTI for addressing weaknesses in its product lines, he says MTI faces "the stiffest of competition" from the larger storage vendors.
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