Dislosure: I am short EMPO. See the full disclaimer at the bottom of this post for details.
I could write a lot of things about Empowered Products (Pinksheets: EMPO), but I will keep this post short. The company makes sex lubricants (competing with Johnson & Johnson’s KY) and while it has a real product and real sales, it is run by a stock promoter, has poor business prospects due to poor brand recognition and intense competition, and is undergoing a paid stock promotion (see: GrowthStockScreener.com). For future reference (after the stock promotion website is taken down in a few months or a year), I have saved a PDF copy of that web page. The bottom line is that investors in EMPO are going to need its products soon because they are about to get screwed hard.
Empowered Products’ website is geared more to selling stock than to selling sex accessories. The stock promoter Scott Fraser is the CEO and owns 40 million shares. With a recent price of $0.79 and 62.4 million shares outstanding, the company has a market cap of $49 million. The company has sales that have declined in the most recent quarter relative to a year ago and it continues to lose money. With a $3 million annual revenue run rate the company is valued at an absurd multiple of 15x sales.
While Empowered Products has put out press releases about its products being sold to Target.com (where I cannot find them one month later) as well as Walgreens (where they can be found at least online) and CVS (where they can be found online), I did not see their products at the one Walgreens I checked and there were few reviews of their products online (one proxy for popularity). A check on Drugstore.com showed that EMPO’s products were not reviewed a lot relative to other brands and they were not the best reviewed nor were they close to a top seller.
Here is the view of the lubricant section at my local Walgreens. Note the distinct lack of EMPO’s products (click images to enlarge):
Now for the more important picture:
and the disclaimer from the stock promotion website:
The Aggressive Growth-Stock Screener and www.GrowthStockScreener.com contains a featured stock report which is intended to be educational in nature, not an investment recommendation and should be viewed as an advertisement. Alpine View Media is providing a budget of $750,000.00 and this report to Crown Pacifica to coordinate the distribution of this featured report on Empowered Products Inc.
Further destruction is almost guaranteed with this pump and dump. Shareholders better lube up!
Disclaimer: I am short 3078 shares of EMPO and may buy to cover the position or add to it at any time after 11/16/2012. I have no relationship with any parties named above. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.