One Of The World’s Biggest Mobile Ad Companies Is In Huge Trouble And Has Stopped Paying Its Bills

August 3, 2013 Leave a comment

One Of The World’s Biggest Mobile Ad Companies Is In Huge Trouble And Has Stopped Paying Its Bills

JIM EDWARDS AUG. 2, 2013, 10:46 AM 5,244 2

We first told you that Velti, the little-known but relatively massive mobile ad company, was in trouble back in June, when we demoted CEO Alex Moukas to 10th place on our annual ranking of the most important people in mobile advertising. The reason? The company cut about 300 of its 1,100+ jobs after Q1 2013 revenue collapsed 20% to $41 million. Velti is in the middle of a restructuring. Its stock, which once traded above $10, is now at $1.08. Its COO, Christos Kaskavelis, has been terminated. The company’s market cap is now less than its projected annual revenues.And now Venture Beat reports that Velti isn’t paying its bills:

Oliver König, CEO of Germany-based Windfinder, says he’s still waiting on thousands of dollars in ad impression and click payments his company is owed from Mobclix, Velti’s real-time mobile ad exchange network.

“We first experienced delays last year,” König said in an email to VentureBeat. “We contacted them and they made their last payment on Feb 6, 2013 for revenues generated until July 2012. They have not made any payments since then.”

There’s even an entire site dedicated to non-payments from Velti. This person claims he or she is owed $350,000, although others report that Velti/Mobclix has restarted payments again.

A company spokesperson tells us:

Velti values our developers. We are committed to paying outstanding amounts due to Mobclix developers and are working to do so as quickly as possible.
The timing is unfortunate because, as a public company, we respect the customary quiet period that precedes our quarterly earnings release. We completed the second quarter on June 30, and we anticipate reporting our results in mid-August.

“We are continuing to win new business,” the spokesperson says. Velti has also appointed a new COO,  Mari Baker. She was on Velti’s board, and in a prior job led the sale of BabyCenter to Johnson & Johnson in 2001.

Velti remains one of the larger mobile ad businesses on the planet, despite its problems. It has real revenue and it just launched a new buy-side ad network, Velti Media. We suspect this company has a fighting chance of emerging from all this nimbler and smaller, if it can just get past its cashflow/restructuring issues.

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