Wednesday, October 30th 2024
Supermicro Shares Plunge 33% as Auditor Quits, Citing Previous Warnings
Supermicro shares took a big hit today when Ernst & Young quit as its auditor, making its stock fall over 30%. EY decided to leave because of their worries in July about how Supermicro runs things, shares information, and keeps track of its money. In August, Supermicro delayed its annual report as they were looking over internal financial controls following Hindenburg Research's allegations of accounting manipulation. Ernst & Young's letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about quitting says they can't trust what the company's leaders say anymore. They also don't want their name on the company's financial papers after discovering new information during their check. "We are resigning due to information that has recently come to our attention which has led us to no longer be able to rely on management's and the Audit Committee's representations and to be unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management."
Supermicro doesn't agree with the accounting firm's decision, and they say fixing these problems won't mean they have to redo any of their financial reports from 2024 or earlier. Commenting on this subject, Nathan Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg, said in a post on X, "As far as auditor statements go, E&Y's SMCI resignation letter is about as strongly worded as I have seen." According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Justice is currently looking into the company. Supermicro will present its first quarter fiscal 2025 business update on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, at 5:00 p.m. ET / 2:00 p.m. PT.
Source:
Reuters
Supermicro doesn't agree with the accounting firm's decision, and they say fixing these problems won't mean they have to redo any of their financial reports from 2024 or earlier. Commenting on this subject, Nathan Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg, said in a post on X, "As far as auditor statements go, E&Y's SMCI resignation letter is about as strongly worded as I have seen." According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Justice is currently looking into the company. Supermicro will present its first quarter fiscal 2025 business update on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, at 5:00 p.m. ET / 2:00 p.m. PT.
23 Comments on Supermicro Shares Plunge 33% as Auditor Quits, Citing Previous Warnings
Doubt Supermicro would fall in to same trap/fate, but you never know - Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, hell even ASRock all have server and industrial 'teams' and products lines and I'm sure they'd happily provide whatever Supermicro did.
A common precursor to a bubble popping is the exposure of corruption. And here the ML bubble should deflate.
Them gone would be the same as the death of SUN.
Doesn't mean that this level of distrust in the management can't be disastrous, especially for a company like super micro that needs to be able to get short term credit
Good riddance to another Intel anti-trust enabler.
Much like there was a "dot com" bubble despite the web being an actual good use for computers.
It all still sounds way too much like crypto: 'Come here, this is really good, you'll make a lot of money and you'll be part of the creation of something new, be a big stakeholder in it, too'. And on the far horizon: 'Eventually this will be useful for all of us, change the world'. Nothing materialized.
If it wasn't for all the CPU vendors implementing NPUs into future CPU SoCs and GPU makers tweaking their designs to better incorporate ML tasks (because really, the 'tensor' cores in the Nvidia GPUs aren't really doing anything else other than DLSS) we may have maybe seen a proliferation of NPU ASIC add-on cards akin to when Ageia did the PhysX cards.
Also, a bubble doesn't need to exist seperate to a useful thing. E.g. a housing bubble doesn't mean housing was a waste of time, the dot-com bubble didn't mean the internet wasn't useful, etc.
It's just that recently we've had some bubbles around things that don't have immediately applicable uses for the majority of people (i.e. blockchain), or in some cases vaguely any use at all (i.e. NFTs, specifically celebrity backed 'club' NFTs), which, if anything, have facilitated numerous pump & dump behaviour and schemes by those in control or 'celebrities' (and I use that would loosely) involved in these schemes.
There is definitely an investment bubble around ML, and it wouldn't surprise me to find the existance of a number of dubious startups which are ultimately just grifting and basically using OpenAI or some other GPT/ML software model and probably doing not much else to develop, simply to just pull in investment with likely no actual future planning in place.
The fact that AI is being tagged on to so many things and being attributed to things that already existed before the whole 'AI' inferencing thing took off is, to an extent, an example of how hype is fuelling this.