View Lays Off 23% Of Workforce, Needs More Funding To Stay Afloat
SoftBank-backed smart glass manufacturer View Inc. is still in dire straits, almost a year after admitting it was at risk of being delisted amid financial reporting weakness.
The Silicon Valley-based tech company disclosed in its annual report Friday that it has laid off roughly 170 employees — almost a quarter of its workforce — and it still has substantial doubt about its ability to continue operations without fresh funding.
"We do not currently have adequate financial resources to fund our forecasted operating costs and meet our obligations for at least twelve months," it wrote in the report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Its cash crunch remains despite raising $206.3M during the fourth quarter through issuing convertible notes and cutting staff. It reported an annual net loss of $337.1M in 2022 after losing $343M in 2021.
View went public in late 2020 to an IPO value of $1.6B after merging with a Cantor Fitzgerald-sponsored special-purpose acquisition company. It debuted at $10 a share but has struggled to keep its price out of penny-stock territory.
It received its first delisting notice from Nasdaq last spring after failing to file quarterly earnings reports and seeing its share price dip to as low as 50 cents. The company said in its latest annual report that it received another notice in February that it was at risk of delisting if its share price doesn't rise above $1 for 10 consecutive days by Aug. 14.
View was trading at 49 cents a share Friday afternoon, and it hasn't traded above $1 at all in 2023. View is seeking a reverse stock split, consolidating its outstanding Class-A common stock in the hopes of staying listed on the Nasdaq exchange.
The internal control failures that led to its missed earnings statements haven't been resolved, View said in its Friday filing.
“We have identified deficiencies in our internal control over financial reporting resulting in material weaknesses and the conclusion that our internal control over financial reporting and our disclosure controls and procedures were not effective as of December 31, 2022,” the company wrote. "Although we plan to complete the remediation process as quickly as possible, we cannot at this time estimate how long it will take."
View has also had to deal with a number of legal issues in the past year, including paying $5M after pleading guilty to a charge of negligently discharging wastewater at its 804K SF plant in Olive Branch, Mississippi.
It is also facing a class-action securities lawsuit from investors, an investigation by the SEC and disclosed that it is cooperating with a request for information from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York.
View is far from the only SoftBank-backed company to have faced major financial challenges since the pandemic. Construction startup Katerra shut down last year and WeWork is also trading well below $1 per share despite a recent debt restructuring. Its market capitalization stands at roughly $573M on Friday afternoon, down from its SoftBank-fueled peak of $47B.
