When POET introduced the Optical Interposer on Jan 29 the share price went from .225 to a high of .40 and closed at .31. The following day they announced the demonstration of the PIN detector at 37G with no market response. In the days to follow POET’s share price went into decline and hit an intra-day low of .22 on Feb 5 to close at .245.

And then what happened? Without any further news the share price strengthened to .57 by Feb 20 with very high volume. POET was forced to issue a news release:

Poet confirmed that there have been no undisclosed material changes to the company's business or operations at this time. "We are pleased to see an increased interest on the part of shareholders and other market participants in Poet's common stock, which we largely attribute to our recent announcement of the optical interposer platform," commented Thomas Mika, Poet's chief financial officer. "We believe the ability to integrate electronic and photonic devices into a single, low-cost, CMOS-compatible package represents a unique value proposition for photonics in general, and particularly in high-speed data communications. In several key application areas, our proprietary platform technology has the potential to surpass or displace both conventional discrete approaches to transceiver architectures, as well as those based on integrated silicon photonics devices. Since announcing the optical interposer platform in January, we have experienced an encouraging market response, resulting in multiple interactions with prospective partners and customers”.

The party was over for this run-up or was it? The share price took a hit but the underlying strength was there and after a short break the price continued to rise to a high of .79 on March 6 and some 3 million .52 warrants were exercised. Insider buying helped but I think there was more to it.

There was interest by market participants for another private placement with a shorter time horizon and a much higher warrant price for half a warrant not a whole one which had been typical issued by this company.

Tom Mika commented at the AGM that he sees warrants as POET’s best source of cash and followed up with the following statement:

“We have an arrangement to try to encourage people once the price is where it needs to be to get those warrants converted as quickly as possible.”

I normally like to talk about the technology and I was one who talked about how important the optical interposer was when it was first announced. And many people said the market does not agree and yet the share price gained over 200% prior to the financing being announced from the time of the initial platform announcement.

Everything that I hear regarding the capability of that platform is music to my ears and I think the initial disappointed expressed by so many on this board will change in a relatively short period of time because what they have is nothing short of an industry step change.

No free space optics. It is a solid state solution that is truly CMOS compatible unlike anything that industry has known.