I especially like the closing of the interview, which sums up the current situation well. The POET train is very well on track, has a lot of passengers on board (products, customers), and is traveling at high speed. But the destination is still some way off and will take several months. It doesn’t help when shareholders in the back seat whine, “When are we finally getting there?”

Here’s a transcript of the last part of the interview with a few rough edges ironed out. Bold is mine, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

2022 is POET’s year. And, you know, as CFO, it’s been a tough year for all of us in the tech space and not just in the tech space. I mean, no company likes to lose half their market cap. But the message is: Don’t panic, particularly to our shareholders.

Look, we are a strong company. We’ve got almost 18 million on our balance sheet as of the end of March, we have no depths or anything that works as depths, which is a convertible. We have real products, we have real customers, and we’ve got a reputation for using capital very well.

I mean, we have a joint venture in which we have been able to build a production facility for our platforms, for our interposer devices in China, with all the capital for CAPEX and OPEX is being contributed by our joint venture partner. We are contributing a narrow slice of our IP to that joint venture, so we didn’t have to spend all of that capital.

And in addition, when you look at other companies in our space that are trying to do what we have done, we have done it on 50 million, and we have products. There are companies that have spent 10 or 20 times the capital that we have invested over the same period of time, and [they] have nothing to show for it.

That’s a reputation we believe institutional investors will pay attention to and that is why we believe that with products that we can demonstrate, with a Nasdaq listing that had gotten us conversations that we’d never would have had without it, that’s what we regard as being in a position of strenght. And that will only get stronger, no matter what the market does, that will only get stronger at POET over the next six months.

(Still, Thomas should be looking at the camera, not at Richard on his screen. But that won’t change the company’s business situation in any way.)