Earnings Call

            The sort of quietness that pervades an office at work.

            Someone from accounting is wondering where Tom is.

            The operations meeting begins and he sits across from his boss, who wears a thick and curly beard below his thick-rimmed glasses and a balding head. He is wearing a dark blue cardigan with his lightly red-checkered white shirt. He adjusts his glasses that rest on his broad nose.

            They start listening to the earnings call.

            “We have achieved 33% revenue growth in Q2 relative to last year. Our cloud platform business is doing well, with subscription numbers up 56% from last quarter. However, we expect gross margins to remain flat until the end of the year, as costs associated with restructuring and the merger fall onto the balance sheet.”

            Mike Vespucci had the kind of voice that resounded in the mid-bass range. He had a way of transitioning into sentences without searching for the words—he was a master of the cadence of business-speak: an emphasis on making money sound important. Integral to the notion of an earnings call was the illusion that the CEO or even the CFO knew everything about the company’s financial state—this was even less true than the promise of their software product.

            Who could blame the investment analysts, though, for dissecting the CEO’s words as proof that rougher quarters were in the vicinity for the company? When the 28-year-old in charge of capital allocation for high-tech at Barclays sat burning the midnight oil to develop a financial model predicting the next five years of Arete’s fiscal performance, who could blame him when he only heard the empty rhetoric of upper management trying to disguise relative non-penetration of emerging markets? When ‘flat revenues’ meant declining sales and ‘capital expenditures’ disguised a negative EBITDA? Who could treat with disdain the so-called investment banker, having had to go through a childhood with a divorced mother who left his father in the wake of the Enron scandal, for calling the CFO out on his bullshit non-GAAP statistics and figures, artificially inflated to please investors? Who could blame him in his search for truth in the cairns of financial statements, digging, canary in hand, for a jewel the public could marvel at? Who could blame him?

            “With all due respect sir, you’ve recorded losses in Asia for the last three years. When do you think the bleeding will stop?” The voice from Deutsche Bank sounded firm.

            “Well if you look at our international operations as a whole, we haven’t done so poorly compared to our competitors. Now, you have to take a macroeconomic approach to this with respect to East Asian and South Asian countries. We’re confident that sales with grow with the ascent of start-ups producing a tech-boom in China. We’re trying to take advantage of that as early as possible.”

            How did bad press become drawn out to 90 minutes in an afternoon when no one besides the analysts were listening? When was this farce going to be called out as such?

            James could give a damn. He walked to the break room to get coffee again and walked out as soon as he could. He turned the corner past the exit and was hit by the warm rays of sunlight. He saw a man lingering with a cigarette near a bench 15 yards to his left and thought about the wonderful spout of weather they were having.

      

            He thought of the CEOs words regarding growth and he was quietly impressed that profitability was on the horizon, targeted for Q3 of this year. Quietly, the venture capitalists and private equity companies were cashing out their investments in Symphnode. They’d done well post-IPO but the merger itself could be a clusterfuck for the people involved. It was like mixing oil and water—one would flow to the top, and it was just a matter of time who could grease the gears faster. Fuck him before he fucks you.

            What was weird was the complicity of everyone involved in making money the primary focus. Fiduciary duty toward shareholders was really an urban myth, but somehow it became hallowed ground.

            When profits took precedence over people. When people were the reason for the profit. Humanity became responsible for its own destruction when that realization became blaise, became a socialist cry instead of a common concern.