Siglent just listed on the Shanghai stock exchange - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / testgear

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 04, 2021, 11:31:43 pm
content: https://siglentna.com/news-article/siglent-technologies-co-ltd-successfully-listed-on-the-shanghai-stock-exchange/

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2021, 11:33:25 pm
content: Yes.https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-technical-support-join-in-eevblog/msg3853934/#msg3853934Quite an achievement.

author: kcbrown
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 12:15:45 am
content: If they had no other reasonable choice for meeting the demand for their products (or expanding their offerings), then so be it.But I otherwise wouldn't regard this as a win at all. Making your company public means that now you're subject to the whims of the shareholders, and in today's world most of them don't careat allabout the long term prospects of the company, but instead only the short term and, sometimes, medium term prospects of the company. All they're interested in doing is selling the stock for as much gain in price in the shortest time as they can, and nothing more.We've seen countless companies fall because of this, including even the most venerated companies like HP.So while I hate to put a damper on this, it's immensely difficult to not be deeply concerned about what this will do to the overall direction of the company. Siglent has been making enormous strides in the quality and usability of their products. That could easily go by the wayside as the beancounters look to cut as many corners as they can in order to "please shareholders".

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 12:41:26 am
content: Quote from: kcbrown on December 06, 2021, 12:15:45 amIt's usually done to ensure that the early employees and/or investers with stock options have a way to finally realise the gains and the investment/time put in.When you give employees stock options, or take private investros money, that's essentially a promise that one day, if the company is successful, it will go public and/or be bought out so they'll all be able to get a gain from the effort put in.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 02:24:29 am
content: Quote from: kcbrown on December 06, 2021, 12:15:45 amIt doesn't have to be all negative. Becoming publicly traded usually means getting a boat load of money injected into the company due to the sales of shares. Lets be honest here; Siglent has been cutting lots of corners and needs to take another huge step in firmware quality improvement to make it possible to enter the A-brand arena. That takes a lot of money; money they likely can't pony up themselves. If you have watched Siglent pricing you can notice that they have been increasing the prices of their products steadily. But at some point you just need economy of scale to make up for the R&D costs which means entering the professional market.

author: Electro Fan
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 05:21:05 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 06, 2021, 02:24:29 amnctnico’s view would be the positive/optimistic view.According to their web site: “Nearly 15% of total sales are invested into research and development annually“https://int.siglent.com/about/It will be interesting to see what happens with the rate of new product introductions and firmware releases, product quality, and prices. Hope tautech had some friends and family shares - he earned it.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 06:22:15 am
content: Quote from: Electro Fan on December 06, 2021, 05:21:05 amThanks but nope, nada, zip.I get my kicks from the tiny changes I can help with another POV they may not have and forwarding feedback to them from the members here and although we are close my independence is more highly valued.I knew nothing about the market listing until I got the same email Dave did and I believe his summary of why they listed is the most likely explanation. Lots of smart chaps there that don't get that way without a good few years under their belts however recently there have been some new appointments so the chatter between the beta testers indicate.That some might cash out won't be overly surprising however whom buys in is of more worry where I hope they can protect themselves from a hostile takeover.

author: kcbrown
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 09:49:39 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 06, 2021, 02:24:29 amI disagree. While you are correct in that Siglenthadbeen cutting a lot of corners, the degree to which they'd been doing that has declined over time, and that is evident in their more recent offerings.So while the amount of improvement in firmware quality to enter the A-brand arena may still be substantial, it's not nearly the amount that it once was and, furthermore, it's not like it's an all-or-nothing thing. Firmware quality is something that can be ramped up over time,as is evident from Siglent's firmware quality over time.This means that Siglent didnotnecessarily need to go public in order to acquire the funds needed to improve quality further. They just needed to continue to be profitable enough to continuously put additional resources into firmware quality.QuoteI've been in the computing industry for nearly 40 years now. And if there's anything I've learned from it, it's that you can't get quality out of software just by throwing money at the problem. Software quality, particularly for the long term, is primarily a matter ofdesignand secondarily of execution, a combination of engineering and craftsmanship. This means you have to hire people who actually know what they're doing and give them sufficient time to do their thing in the way their experience says it needs to be done. Youcannot achieve software quality just by throwing more bodies at the problem. SeeThe Mythical Man Monthfor an excellent treatise on this.So I don't buy this assertion of yours, at least in the way you worded it. I agree that they'd need more money in order to hire the appropriate people, and they might also need it to make it possible to do parallel development efforts (one to maintain what they've got and to port it to new platforms, another to do a proper ground-up redesign that incorporates the lessons learned from the previous effort). But I'm not convinced that it takesgoing publicto get the needed funds for that, because I don't see how we're talking about decimal orders of magnitude differences in needed funds for this.QuoteThe question is the amount of profit they're making. That profit is what goes back into R&D. They've increased the prices of their products, whichshouldtranslate to additional profit that can then be put back into R&D.Going public means they get a bunch of additional funds, and while thatcanbe used to do R&D right, that will only happen if the investors perceive that to be a goodshort termmove. Why should we believe that short-term oriented investors will perceive R&D, which is amedium-terminvestment at minimum particularly with respect to what we're talking about here, as the proper target for the additional funds?

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 10:07:16 pm
content: Quote from: kcbrown on December 06, 2021, 09:49:39 pmOfcourse you need to hire better people. Maybe even get some people from A-brand firms that know how to build good test equipment. But these aren't cheap. At the moment it seems Siglent has several outside beta-testers to do some firmware testing. I don't have the feeling these people are getting paid a lot. The whole testing activity needs to be organised in-house but that also requires having people on the payroll that actually know how the equipment should work (what users expect). One of the statements that made me chuckle recently: the new SDS5k scope works great with a mouse. FFS it is a touch screen scope!

author: kcbrown
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 11:31:13 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 06, 2021, 10:07:16 pmThey're not cheap, but I dare say they're not so expensive as to demand that the company get public funding! I expect we're talking about $250K/year per top-level person. That's just my guess. It may be that people who are familiar with test equipment firmware are considerably more expensive than that. Can't say on that. But the nature of the problem in test equipment is that you have what amounts to a real-time system underneath with a somewhat-real-time user interface on top, all rolled into one.As I mentioned, the primary issue is with design. The engineering itself has to be solid from the ground up. If you've got a bad design then you can do only so much with it, after which the amount of effort to improve it further starts to exceed the amount of effort that would be needed to do a ground-up rewrite.Thisis where you should be spending a significant portion of your money, but the amount of money we're talking about here isn't anything like the 1.2billionYuan (nearly $200milliondollars) raised in Siglent's IPO (https://www.crunchbase.com/ipo/siglent-technologies-ipo--44da7c8d).QuotePeople who work on open source projects often don't get paid at all. And yet, they volunteer their time and effort anyway, and the end result is often of higher quality than commercial efforts (consider, for example, the rise of Linux and its tool chain, which are actually separate, independent things but which both are a considerable improvement over previous commercial Unix offerings).If someoneisbeing paid officially for their efforts, then there is usually some relationship between the quality of the work and what they're being paid for it. But that tends to happen because what they're doing for their job isn't necessarily what they're primarily interested in, and even if it is, thebusiness itselfwinds up placing constraints on them that prevent them from doing the job with the quality they'd prefer to do it. I've seen this countless times over the years, where paid software engineers were prevented from developing their softwareproperlybecause the beancounters insisted that time to release was more important than the quality of the release. It doesn't help that some of the in-vogue development processes (e.g., "Agile/Scrum", wherein development happens in fixed-time "sprints", the primary focus is on iterative development rather than proper up-front engineering, and the assumption is that proper quality and hard deadlines aren't conflicting things) effectively sabotage quality while claiming to improve it.The beta testers you want the most are the ones who would actually use the instrument and its firmware to do real-world things. I can't count how many times I've seen customers break software in ways that QA simply didn't catch because QA simply didn't account for the specific use case, or didn't have the proper test setup, or a myriad of other things. There's a lesson to be learned from all that:artificial test cases are no substitute for real world testing.If Siglent is smart, then their beta testers are actually people who intend to use the final firmware for doing real-world things, and are doing their testing while doing real-world things. Their alpha testers will be in-house people, and they'll be tasked with developing and implementing automatic and repeatable functional testing.User interfaces bring an entirely different set of needs into the mix. You need people who are willing to try different user interface approaches in order to get a sense of what works better, more efficiently, more clearly, etc. Obviously some of these people should be your own in-house hardware engineers who use test equipment for their jobs. This means, basically, an "eat your own dog food" approach. And it should be clear that much of the testing that goes on at all levels should be on the part of such people, with the understanding that at the end of they day they must still be productive. If your product is so broken that such people can't use it then it's time to go back to the drawing board.QuoteWhy would the fact that it works with a mouse be concerning at all? It turns out that it's actually rather useful for it to work with a mouse. Consider, for instance, the case where the scope is near the rear of the bench. If you're going to manipulate it, you need to reach over everything on the bench in order to get at it. With the mouse (particularly a wireless mouse), you don't need to do any such thing. The mouse can be in easy reach and you can use it to manipulate the scope while also being able to manipulate the probes with your other hand, without the scope itself needing to be within easy reach. A mouse takes upmuchless space than the scope does, and the mouse doesn't have to be positioned so that it's easily visible like the scope needs to be.So as much as you might malign the use of a mouse with these things, it turns out to be a very useful capability.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2021, 10:54:11 pm
content: Had a quick search and it appears stock has appreciated ~10% since listing with ~1.75m shares traded.https://uk.investing.com/equities/siglent-tech-historical-data