To the Shareholders of E-Waste Systems Inc.
E-Waste Systems Inc. set out on a challenging endeavor – to consolidate a fragmented (and largely new) industry, electronic waste – eWaste™. After a trying planning year in 2012, we introduced a comprehensive plan in 2013 that included three key strategies: Build a Global Brand, Expand our Technologies, and Accelerate our Revenues. One year later, we are able to report that we have achieved our first milestone.
Global Brand: We are now connected on every continent in the world and can service any zip code in the United States.
We developed ePlant™, eWasteCC™, and eWasteTRACK™ that provides unique technology differentiation.
We have accelerated our Owned-Business Revenue to an annual run rate of $2Million and our Invested-Asset Revenue to an annual run rate over $50Million - - from zero barely a year ago.
More importantly, we built a strong foundation for growth so we can fulfill our mission on an accelerated pace. And all of this we have accomplished with little capital. As we sit today, we have matured the strategy and are confident we will be able to accelerate our expansion in the coming years.
With an industry crying out for leadership, we set out specific growth objectives that are extremely challenging, knowing that great reward comes from great expectation - - and do what others have been unable to do which we have now started. We made commitments to the highest standards of professionalism and to absolute compliance. We made pledges to support Fair Trade Employment and to Zero Landfill. All consistent with our overriding and absolute commitment to improving our Environment… and we did all of this as a publicly traded company with a dedication to becoming Exchange Listed in the shortest time frame possible.
We have achieved our 1st major milestone, working hard to build a formula for success and to begin execution. We are off to a solid start but our expectations are significantly greater.
Our gain in market cap in the year from the launch of our business plan was over $4 million – up nearly 400% of what it was when we began. That gain was after our deducting nearly $7 million of development expenses representing an investment in our foundation for growth.
A good way to show first year performance measurement is to observe the change in EWSI’s per-share revenue - - it is dramatic. Much of the value we have created is presently intrinsic value. Now we begin the process of converting this intrinsic value to achieve visible market based values.
At the moment, EWSI’s intrinsic value far exceeds its market capitalization and public market value. Although the difference has widened considerably in recent weeks leading up to this letter, rest assured that our focus is on unlocking our intrinsic value. We remain laser-focused in this regard and must pay less attention to the day-to-day variations in the public market. Improvements in our market capitalization will follow performance.
Our Invested-Asset Business includes primarily our significant Operation in China. Our decision to shift operations to the Invested-Assets group meant a shift of nearly $20Million in revenue. Our decision to move the operations was done after careful consideration and was ultimately made to give us time to strengthen the controls and compliance foundations necessary to be consistent with our commitment to remaining a SEC fully reporting public company.
Clearly the market is not currently factoring in all that our Invested-Assets bring to the company – but we believe that both EWSI’s market capitalization and intrinsic value will outperform the market in the near future. Our stock has underperformed in the last few months after reaching a short-term peak in the 4th quarter as a consequence of actions taken in consistent with our laser focus on being completely compliant. After our current aggressive implementation of systems and processes to support our growth and compliance obligations are implemented, we expect to see our extrinsic values match the intrinsic.
Recap - The Year Since Launching our Business Plan
When we look back over the year and evaluate our performance against our objectives, here is what we see:
1. We built a Global Brand
In a year, working smart, we spent very little – less than $50,000 - yet got a tremendous return in the form of public exposure and executed deals promoting our brand through global outreach. Our excellent, attractive and frequently updated website helped reach our global audience and a large and increasing network of business developers. What a great investment that was. The press picked up our announcements and people around the world took to our message with great enthusiasm. Within weeks, we received email requests from concerned individuals, top executives, and government officials. That small investment promoted our brand, delivered to EWSI quality partners on EVERY continent - - and we think that is just the beginning! We now have one of the largest global footprints of any company in the industry thus achieving our goal by building a foundation that can help us even further expand the intrinsic value of our per-share results.
No other company in our industry has been able to secure such a valuable base in such as short period of time. We have people now promoting the cause of EWSI in Europe, the USA, China, Africa, the Middle East, India, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and Australia.
The market has been listening, and our team has been working their magic with new designs, expanded looks and feels, and more comprehensive and intelligent interpretations. Shortly, these will be come more visible and they will help us achieve even more brand differentiation.
We expect the global market to continue to respond to us this way and we will remain fleet of foot in responding to them to enable even further gains. What a great return on our investment!
2. We Expanded our Technologies
We now own a wide variety of exceptional technologies. Best known is ePlant™, the engineering technology range now supported by our strategic engineering partner Loyalty in China. Now, we can engineer the most complete commodity extraction from end of life materials found anywhere in the world. Imagine being able to take a ton of unwanted electronics and to convert more than 95% of that into precious metals, copper, steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, lead and more. Our bright engineering team is committed to turning that small leftover residue into usable materials while extracting ever-higher values from the commodities as part of our commitment to Zero Landfill. Any company handling these end of life materials should do themselves a favor by calling us to reduce their costs, eliminate landfill, and increase their revenue. As the calls come in, we have solutions to enable companies to partner with us in any number of ways.
We continue to search for even more unique technologies. Last year, we contracted for the development of a unique software based technology to help organizations reduce real costs of doing business through reduction of energy consumption realized by audits of their operations. We provide a solution to enable upgrade of electronic assets while generating credits for the reduction in energy. This is called eWaste Carbon Credit™. These carbon credits generate real revenue in the fastest growing commodity market in the world. Any organization can enhance their value by recycling the end of life electronic assets through us. We also have active deals under consideration in rare earths extraction and in landfill leachate reduction, for example. Our investors will soon see this as a win-win-win solution.
We are actively working to find these deals. They deploy capital in areas that fit with our philosophy and that will be managed by experts. This enables us to leverage the value we have already created with the potential for more earnings for our shareholders.
3. We Accelerated Our Revenue
From Zero to a running rate of over $20M in the first year is indeed ‘Accelerating our Revenue’!
We completed two acquisitions, spending almost $2 million to purchase Surf Investments in California and selected assets, customers, locations and credentials in Ohio and New York (which became our second subsidiary). Both deals fit us well and these companies will prosper in 2014 and beyond. With the Surf purchase and the new EWS subsidiary, moreover, we created a base of operations for both organic growth and for future acquisitions. Julie Peterson, the founder of Surf, is now leading these operations. She and her talented employees are responsible for our operations in the USA. We now have the best set of credentials in the industry and well over 100,000 square feet of processing space with the capacity to handle millions of pounds of end of life electronics each year. Simply put, our infrastructure enables us to address the USA market as it should be – it is the world’s largest economy and the biggest producer of end of life electronics.
EWSI also established a great ‘beach-head’ in China – the world’s second largest economy, and soon to be the largest producer of e-waste in the world. We established an office in Shanghai, the world’s biggest city, and hired an exceptionally talented team of business development professionals who are deeply knowledgeable of and connected with businesses across China. EWSI has now invested more than $4M in the China market and we are completely committed to success there. The English name for the company is XuFu. Led by an incredibly talented executive, they have raced ahead to generate nearly $20M in revenues in less than a year and have contracted to bring in more than $30M this year. In the past 6 months, I have visited 5 times and been introduced by our team to a wide range of government officials and professional business people and this has proven that the opportunities are there and we have the right talent to maximize the opportunity.
To execute this part of our plan, we took a page out of the playbook of other major corporations, especially the hotel industry, to deploy an asset leasing strategy for developing our foothold in those markets and we will continue to use this limited risk strategy to grow our business. It is a ‘capital light’ strategy to bring operations into our fold - - what we call ‘the test drive before you buy’ model. We have already put it into effect and well over $60M in annualized revenue is now under our management.
In summary, this last year is full of positive developments in our business. Our team is deeply committed to growth and long-term sustainable value and we upheld our commitment to operate to the highest standards of compliance and will not waiver in that commitment. We worked through changes to bring in a team of professionals to support our commitment to operate simultaneously in both China and the USA, as part of our global strategy, and we chose to implement world-class systems that can support our aggressive but difficult growth.
At the end of the year, EWSI and our Invested-Assets Operations employed well more than 250 talented professionals … all focused on creating significant value for us. Our overhead remains small and will stay so including dedicated and invaluable members, Susan Johnson and Cris Giancotti, our PR/IR contractors who bring increased understanding of the market and our executive team in Shanghai with their proven and remarkable skills in business development. Their contributions are just beginning: these people all have EWSI blood in their veins.
The outcome is that we remained compliant, we built a solid business platform, and we dedicated ourselves to an aggressive development plan… and more will come!
Priorities Going Forward
We have dramatically expanded our team of financial and accounting professionals led by Joseph Himy and Michael Armandi - - talented financial executives with rich experience in enterprise level public accounting. They came in at the very end of last year along with our new auditors. We also added Annie Ou, a former ‘big three’ auditor to be our internal financial talent. They will be driving all of our reporting, compliance and accounting functions with a very vigorous set of challenges. Together they will take over all accounting and finance responsibilities with four times the resources of the past.
My long time colleague Dan Feeney will be driving our systems implementation to accomplish global cloud based systems that will form part of our eWasteTRACK™ brand. These new systems will be based on NetSuite’s completely integrated finance, accounting and customer relationship management modules with nearly infinite expandability. With this in place, GAAP accounting, which varies from country to country, will be unquestionably applied to conform to US GAAP, consolidated reporting will be nearly instantaneous, language and currency differences will be completely integrated, and everything executed has built-in auditability.
To complete the picture, our new audit firm will complete a full audit of the Invested-Asset Operations so that we can consolidate the revenues and start making the intrinsic value of our firm more clearly recognized in the market.
Since the beginning of 2014, our US team has opened a smart, modern e-waste plant in Ohio after moving into professional new premises in California. They will be enhancing the New York operation in the upcoming months and we are now looking to add some top-drawer business development people to the team. If you know of individuals who have high standards, a keen ability to close deals, and are willing to be paid based on performance, you should have them call us.
To further our branding, we will soon announce details of our eWaste, eVolve, and eIncubator divisions and begin to make additional investments into these entities for the benefit of our shareholders.
China’s market economy will continue to work its magic and will be a major part, and the fastest growing part of our expansion. America’s best days lie ahead and we will be a major player there. With this tailwind working for us, we expect to build EWSI’s per-share intrinsic value even further by:
constantly improving the growth of our subsidiaries; expanding our eVolve Invested-Asset Operations and making them fully audited executing bolt-on acquisitions; benefiting our shareholders with our eIncubator projects; make EWSI’s intrinsic value visible; and making an occasional large acquisition.
Those building blocks will be resting on a rock-solid foundation.
Intrinsic Business Value
While the intrinsic value cannot be quantified with precision, consider these quantitative factors. Our Invested-Asset Operations delivered $20Million in sales last year and the annual run-rate in the last two quarters was over $50Million. In addition, we signed a contract with Tanke Inc. expected to deliver at least $30MM this year. When our audits of these operations are completed and systems installed, we will either consolidate these in their entirety or account for them under an equity method. We have the right financial minds and auditors working on this now, and either way, the values are there for our shareholders.
Let’s also examine our balance sheet. The assets forming our Ohio and New York operations were recorded at book value while we gather information on the fair market value. Similarly, the assets and goodwill of Surf and China and other US operations need further review. We charged most of these costs to the P&L as professional fees and expenses but we are working with our professionals to revisit this. Additionally, the largest portion of the debt on our balance sheet is owed to management and insiders, most of whom have taken little or no cash payment for their efforts. We are working on the best way to turn this debt into equity. All of these steps will positively impact our assets, our investments and our debt renegotiation as part of the plan to prepare to be an Exchange Listed company.
All of this is within our control and we are committed to taking steps to reflect our activities and unlock our intrinsic value.
Our confidence is based on our own experiences and by the knowledge that investment in environmentally sound business practices is both prudent and financially sound. It is in the self-interest of governments to support those of us who commit to delivering these benefits - - and we are already engaged in programs to obtain that government support. It is also in our self-interest to conduct our operations to earn the continued support of our regulators. Our commitment to do everything necessary to remain at the top of the compliance league tables remains paramount.
The Public Market We will continue to improve our communications with the investing public, including attracting more and bigger investors - - especially institutional ones. This year we embraced the SEC approved social media method of communicating and added new, dedicated shareholder relations function. We further added more resources here as we hired a professional IR/PR organization to take our communication with our public to a new level. We remain more focused on fulfilling our business mission and less focused on the gyrations of the public markets.
Investments In addition to our efforts with our Invested-Asset businesses, we exchanged convertible preferred stock with Tanke, Inc. (another publicly traded company with its focus on China and the environment) - - and we have agreed to do more. The Tanke group has been instrumental in bringing us into deals.
In addition, a number of companies around the world are becoming branded members of the EWSI family. These deals include the sale of brand licenses from us in return for convertible notes for the license fees. Our plan is follow those companies as they develop and when they succeed, we can exercise our right to convert the notes for equity in the company. It is another ‘capital light’ method of investing in our future that adds to our intrinsic value.
Thank you for being a shareholder. And, I look forward to a year in which your intrinsic value can become visible in the marketplace.
We are thrilled at our prospects and ‘here is to our future’!
Martin Nielson Founder May 21, 2014
E-Waste Systems Inc. set out on a challenging endeavor – to consolidate a fragmented (and largely new) industry, electronic waste – eWaste™. After a trying planning year in 2012, we introduced a comprehensive plan in 2013 that included three key strategies: Build a Global Brand, Expand our Technologies, and Accelerate our Revenues. One year later, we are able to report that we have achieved our first milestone.
Global Brand: We are now connected on every continent in the world and can service any zip code in the United States.
We developed ePlant™, eWasteCC™, and eWasteTRACK™ that provides unique technology differentiation.
We have accelerated our Owned-Business Revenue to an annual run rate of $2Million and our Invested-Asset Revenue to an annual run rate over $50Million - - from zero barely a year ago.
More importantly, we built a strong foundation for growth so we can fulfill our mission on an accelerated pace. And all of this we have accomplished with little capital. As we sit today, we have matured the strategy and are confident we will be able to accelerate our expansion in the coming years.
With an industry crying out for leadership, we set out specific growth objectives that are extremely challenging, knowing that great reward comes from great expectation - - and do what others have been unable to do which we have now started. We made commitments to the highest standards of professionalism and to absolute compliance. We made pledges to support Fair Trade Employment and to Zero Landfill. All consistent with our overriding and absolute commitment to improving our Environment… and we did all of this as a publicly traded company with a dedication to becoming Exchange Listed in the shortest time frame possible.
We have achieved our 1st major milestone, working hard to build a formula for success and to begin execution. We are off to a solid start but our expectations are significantly greater.
Our gain in market cap in the year from the launch of our business plan was over $4 million – up nearly 400% of what it was when we began. That gain was after our deducting nearly $7 million of development expenses representing an investment in our foundation for growth.
A good way to show first year performance measurement is to observe the change in EWSI’s per-share revenue - - it is dramatic. Much of the value we have created is presently intrinsic value. Now we begin the process of converting this intrinsic value to achieve visible market based values.
At the moment, EWSI’s intrinsic value far exceeds its market capitalization and public market value. Although the difference has widened considerably in recent weeks leading up to this letter, rest assured that our focus is on unlocking our intrinsic value. We remain laser-focused in this regard and must pay less attention to the day-to-day variations in the public market. Improvements in our market capitalization will follow performance.
Our Invested-Asset Business includes primarily our significant Operation in China. Our decision to shift operations to the Invested-Assets group meant a shift of nearly $20Million in revenue. Our decision to move the operations was done after careful consideration and was ultimately made to give us time to strengthen the controls and compliance foundations necessary to be consistent with our commitment to remaining a SEC fully reporting public company.
Clearly the market is not currently factoring in all that our Invested-Assets bring to the company – but we believe that both EWSI’s market capitalization and intrinsic value will outperform the market in the near future. Our stock has underperformed in the last few months after reaching a short-term peak in the 4th quarter as a consequence of actions taken in consistent with our laser focus on being completely compliant. After our current aggressive implementation of systems and processes to support our growth and compliance obligations are implemented, we expect to see our extrinsic values match the intrinsic.
Recap - The Year Since Launching our Business Plan
When we look back over the year and evaluate our performance against our objectives, here is what we see:
1. We built a Global Brand
In a year, working smart, we spent very little – less than $50,000 - yet got a tremendous return in the form of public exposure and executed deals promoting our brand through global outreach. Our excellent, attractive and frequently updated website helped reach our global audience and a large and increasing network of business developers. What a great investment that was. The press picked up our announcements and people around the world took to our message with great enthusiasm. Within weeks, we received email requests from concerned individuals, top executives, and government officials. That small investment promoted our brand, delivered to EWSI quality partners on EVERY continent - - and we think that is just the beginning! We now have one of the largest global footprints of any company in the industry thus achieving our goal by building a foundation that can help us even further expand the intrinsic value of our per-share results.
No other company in our industry has been able to secure such a valuable base in such as short period of time. We have people now promoting the cause of EWSI in Europe, the USA, China, Africa, the Middle East, India, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and Australia.
The market has been listening, and our team has been working their magic with new designs, expanded looks and feels, and more comprehensive and intelligent interpretations. Shortly, these will be come more visible and they will help us achieve even more brand differentiation.
We expect the global market to continue to respond to us this way and we will remain fleet of foot in responding to them to enable even further gains. What a great return on our investment!
2. We Expanded our Technologies
We now own a wide variety of exceptional technologies. Best known is ePlant™, the engineering technology range now supported by our strategic engineering partner Loyalty in China. Now, we can engineer the most complete commodity extraction from end of life materials found anywhere in the world. Imagine being able to take a ton of unwanted electronics and to convert more than 95% of that into precious metals, copper, steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, lead and more. Our bright engineering team is committed to turning that small leftover residue into usable materials while extracting ever-higher values from the commodities as part of our commitment to Zero Landfill. Any company handling these end of life materials should do themselves a favor by calling us to reduce their costs, eliminate landfill, and increase their revenue. As the calls come in, we have solutions to enable companies to partner with us in any number of ways.
We continue to search for even more unique technologies. Last year, we contracted for the development of a unique software based technology to help organizations reduce real costs of doing business through reduction of energy consumption realized by audits of their operations. We provide a solution to enable upgrade of electronic assets while generating credits for the reduction in energy. This is called eWaste Carbon Credit™. These carbon credits generate real revenue in the fastest growing commodity market in the world. Any organization can enhance their value by recycling the end of life electronic assets through us. We also have active deals under consideration in rare earths extraction and in landfill leachate reduction, for example. Our investors will soon see this as a win-win-win solution.
We are actively working to find these deals. They deploy capital in areas that fit with our philosophy and that will be managed by experts. This enables us to leverage the value we have already created with the potential for more earnings for our shareholders.
3. We Accelerated Our Revenue
From Zero to a running rate of over $20M in the first year is indeed ‘Accelerating our Revenue’!
We completed two acquisitions, spending almost $2 million to purchase Surf Investments in California and selected assets, customers, locations and credentials in Ohio and New York (which became our second subsidiary). Both deals fit us well and these companies will prosper in 2014 and beyond. With the Surf purchase and the new EWS subsidiary, moreover, we created a base of operations for both organic growth and for future acquisitions. Julie Peterson, the founder of Surf, is now leading these operations. She and her talented employees are responsible for our operations in the USA. We now have the best set of credentials in the industry and well over 100,000 square feet of processing space with the capacity to handle millions of pounds of end of life electronics each year. Simply put, our infrastructure enables us to address the USA market as it should be – it is the world’s largest economy and the biggest producer of end of life electronics.
EWSI also established a great ‘beach-head’ in China – the world’s second largest economy, and soon to be the largest producer of e-waste in the world. We established an office in Shanghai, the world’s biggest city, and hired an exceptionally talented team of business development professionals who are deeply knowledgeable of and connected with businesses across China. EWSI has now invested more than $4M in the China market and we are completely committed to success there. The English name for the company is XuFu. Led by an incredibly talented executive, they have raced ahead to generate nearly $20M in revenues in less than a year and have contracted to bring in more than $30M this year. In the past 6 months, I have visited 5 times and been introduced by our team to a wide range of government officials and professional business people and this has proven that the opportunities are there and we have the right talent to maximize the opportunity.
To execute this part of our plan, we took a page out of the playbook of other major corporations, especially the hotel industry, to deploy an asset leasing strategy for developing our foothold in those markets and we will continue to use this limited risk strategy to grow our business. It is a ‘capital light’ strategy to bring operations into our fold - - what we call ‘the test drive before you buy’ model. We have already put it into effect and well over $60M in annualized revenue is now under our management.
In summary, this last year is full of positive developments in our business. Our team is deeply committed to growth and long-term sustainable value and we upheld our commitment to operate to the highest standards of compliance and will not waiver in that commitment. We worked through changes to bring in a team of professionals to support our commitment to operate simultaneously in both China and the USA, as part of our global strategy, and we chose to implement world-class systems that can support our aggressive but difficult growth.
At the end of the year, EWSI and our Invested-Assets Operations employed well more than 250 talented professionals … all focused on creating significant value for us. Our overhead remains small and will stay so including dedicated and invaluable members, Susan Johnson and Cris Giancotti, our PR/IR contractors who bring increased understanding of the market and our executive team in Shanghai with their proven and remarkable skills in business development. Their contributions are just beginning: these people all have EWSI blood in their veins.
The outcome is that we remained compliant, we built a solid business platform, and we dedicated ourselves to an aggressive development plan… and more will come!
Priorities Going Forward
We have dramatically expanded our team of financial and accounting professionals led by Joseph Himy and Michael Armandi - - talented financial executives with rich experience in enterprise level public accounting. They came in at the very end of last year along with our new auditors. We also added Annie Ou, a former ‘big three’ auditor to be our internal financial talent. They will be driving all of our reporting, compliance and accounting functions with a very vigorous set of challenges. Together they will take over all accounting and finance responsibilities with four times the resources of the past.
My long time colleague Dan Feeney will be driving our systems implementation to accomplish global cloud based systems that will form part of our eWasteTRACK™ brand. These new systems will be based on NetSuite’s completely integrated finance, accounting and customer relationship management modules with nearly infinite expandability. With this in place, GAAP accounting, which varies from country to country, will be unquestionably applied to conform to US GAAP, consolidated reporting will be nearly instantaneous, language and currency differences will be completely integrated, and everything executed has built-in auditability.
To complete the picture, our new audit firm will complete a full audit of the Invested-Asset Operations so that we can consolidate the revenues and start making the intrinsic value of our firm more clearly recognized in the market.
Since the beginning of 2014, our US team has opened a smart, modern e-waste plant in Ohio after moving into professional new premises in California. They will be enhancing the New York operation in the upcoming months and we are now looking to add some top-drawer business development people to the team. If you know of individuals who have high standards, a keen ability to close deals, and are willing to be paid based on performance, you should have them call us.
To further our branding, we will soon announce details of our eWaste, eVolve, and eIncubator divisions and begin to make additional investments into these entities for the benefit of our shareholders.
China’s market economy will continue to work its magic and will be a major part, and the fastest growing part of our expansion. America’s best days lie ahead and we will be a major player there. With this tailwind working for us, we expect to build EWSI’s per-share intrinsic value even further by:
constantly improving the growth of our subsidiaries; expanding our eVolve Invested-Asset Operations and making them fully audited executing bolt-on acquisitions; benefiting our shareholders with our eIncubator projects; make EWSI’s intrinsic value visible; and making an occasional large acquisition.
Those building blocks will be resting on a rock-solid foundation.
Intrinsic Business Value
While the intrinsic value cannot be quantified with precision, consider these quantitative factors. Our Invested-Asset Operations delivered $20Million in sales last year and the annual run-rate in the last two quarters was over $50Million. In addition, we signed a contract with Tanke Inc. expected to deliver at least $30MM this year. When our audits of these operations are completed and systems installed, we will either consolidate these in their entirety or account for them under an equity method. We have the right financial minds and auditors working on this now, and either way, the values are there for our shareholders.
Let’s also examine our balance sheet. The assets forming our Ohio and New York operations were recorded at book value while we gather information on the fair market value. Similarly, the assets and goodwill of Surf and China and other US operations need further review. We charged most of these costs to the P&L as professional fees and expenses but we are working with our professionals to revisit this. Additionally, the largest portion of the debt on our balance sheet is owed to management and insiders, most of whom have taken little or no cash payment for their efforts. We are working on the best way to turn this debt into equity. All of these steps will positively impact our assets, our investments and our debt renegotiation as part of the plan to prepare to be an Exchange Listed company.
All of this is within our control and we are committed to taking steps to reflect our activities and unlock our intrinsic value.
Our confidence is based on our own experiences and by the knowledge that investment in environmentally sound business practices is both prudent and financially sound. It is in the self-interest of governments to support those of us who commit to delivering these benefits - - and we are already engaged in programs to obtain that government support. It is also in our self-interest to conduct our operations to earn the continued support of our regulators. Our commitment to do everything necessary to remain at the top of the compliance league tables remains paramount.
The Public Market We will continue to improve our communications with the investing public, including attracting more and bigger investors - - especially institutional ones. This year we embraced the SEC approved social media method of communicating and added new, dedicated shareholder relations function. We further added more resources here as we hired a professional IR/PR organization to take our communication with our public to a new level. We remain more focused on fulfilling our business mission and less focused on the gyrations of the public markets.
Investments In addition to our efforts with our Invested-Asset businesses, we exchanged convertible preferred stock with Tanke, Inc. (another publicly traded company with its focus on China and the environment) - - and we have agreed to do more. The Tanke group has been instrumental in bringing us into deals.
In addition, a number of companies around the world are becoming branded members of the EWSI family. These deals include the sale of brand licenses from us in return for convertible notes for the license fees. Our plan is follow those companies as they develop and when they succeed, we can exercise our right to convert the notes for equity in the company. It is another ‘capital light’ method of investing in our future that adds to our intrinsic value.
Thank you for being a shareholder. And, I look forward to a year in which your intrinsic value can become visible in the marketplace.
We are thrilled at our prospects and ‘here is to our future’!
Martin Nielson Founder May 21, 2014
