High Volume Isn’t Nearly Enough For Universal Detection

0

Los Angeles County’s smallest public company, and certainly the company with the smallest share price, turned out to have one of the biggest trading weeks of all local companies last week.


Universal Detection Technology Inc. was the seventh most-actively traded stock on the LABJ Stock Index last week, with more than 19 million shares trading hands. That was fewer trades than such companies as Amgen Inc. and the Walt Disney Co., but more than Activision Inc. and DirecTV Group Inc.


The value of the shares, traded on the Over the Counter bulletin board, dropped 19 percent last week. Still, it wasn’t a lot of money, since Universal Detection’s stock trades for less than half a cent.


The Beverly Hills-based company develops early-warning detection systems for airborne biological and chemical agents. The company hasn’t pulled a profit in years and has lost $12 million over the past three years. Its market cap has shrunk from $4 million to $1.4 million over the last year.


“It seems people have become complacent about the threat of a bio terror attack,” Chief Executive Jacques Tizabi said. “It is still one of the foremost threats to our country.”


Still, the company is coming off a “record” year in sales. The company sold two of its hallmark products, an early-warning anthrax detection device, called the BSM-2000, to the British government. That sale accounted for nearly all of the company’s annual sales, of $111,000, he said.


The company began trading over the counter in 1971, as Pollution Research and Control Corp. and changed its name, and focus, to Universal Detection in 2003, when Tizabi took over the company.


All is not doom and gloom with Universal Detection.


“We’re out of the research and development phase so we don’t need very much money to operate,” Tizabi said. “We’re poised for growth. We’ll just have to see when and if it comes.”

No posts to display