UNIVERSAL EXPRESS INCORPORATED
Universal Express -USXP- CEO, Richard Altomare Interviewed on Hotstockchat.com
Tuesday October 7, 1:54 pm ET
Ich weiss, es ist lang,aber sehr interessant.
Vor allem den Abschnitt mit den Millionen von Shares die geschortet sind.Die müssen und werden heute covern.
Interview Transcript
Transcript of Tom Allinder of HotStockChat.com’s Interview with Richard Altomare, CEO and President of Universal Express, Incorporated (OTCBB-USXP)
Tom: Hello and welcome to HotStockChat.com. My name is Tom Allinder. Today our guest is Mr. Richard Altomare. Mr. Altomare is the Chief Executive Officer of Universal Express, Incorporated. Universal Express is traded on the OTCBB market under ticker symbol USXP. Before we go into the interview, we need to cover our disclaimer.
This interview will contain forward-looking statements by our guest. The profile of the company may contain forward-looking statements as well. The statements made by our guests at HotStockChat.com may not necessarily reflect the views of the management of HotStockChat.com. HotStockChat.com and its management is not responsible for the statements made by our guests during the course of the interview. The information provided in the profile is provided from the company, from the company’s website, from the company’s filings, and not by HotStockChat.com. At HotStockChat.com, we make every effort to verify our guests’ statements and the information they provide to use before the information is posted on our website. However, in many cases we can only rely solely on that information provided by the guest and/or their company.
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One other piece of information that I want to cover is this interview and the profile of the company is uncompensated. The reason that we’re doing this interview at HotStockChat.com is to bring to light and put more light on the situation of the naked short selling that is going on on some of the junior markets in the United States.
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All right, that was quite a mouthful. Hello Mr. Altomare, how are you doing today?
Mr. Altomare: I’m good, Tom, thank you very much.
Tom: Could you give us an outline of your business at Universal Express? In other words, what does Universal Express do?
Mr. Altomare: Well, Tom, Universal Express is an outsourced transportation conglomerate. We have three wholly owned subsidiaries at this present time. Our first subsidiary is our trade association, which we call World Post. And the trade association basically is a role model of what FTD does to the floral industry. World Post has attempted to do the same thing to the private postal industry. The private postal industry has about 15,000 postal stores and they do about $9 billion in revenue but they don’t seem to appear on anyone’s radar screen, so the creation over the past decade of a private postal association has been a challenging one for us and in that association, we put strategic partners together with the postal stores and we utilize the collective buying power of the postal stores to attempt to enhance the value of our association.
The second division of Universal Express is our logistics division, and most people know of the two major companies that we have in that division; both of them are related to the postal stores, but they can stand outside the postal stores. One of them is our luggage business. Most people call it simply Luggage Express, although we have obtained and purchased a number of our former competitors in the luggage business and simply put, in the luggage industry, we pick up suitcases at people’s homes and bring it to their end destination so that they do not have to carry it, wait in line with it, or wait for it during the process of their travel. Initially, this was thought of where the postal store in the zip code where the individual called in, would be the one who picked it up, bring it back to their store, we took advantage of our collective buying power with the major carriers and we utilized them. We still do that. However, in many cases we don’t use the postal store in some areas; we use the direct third-party carriers such as Federal Express, UPS, Airborne, or 106 couriers that we also are contracted to work with.
The other division within the logistics business is World Post, the same name as our trade association, but an envelope, and it’s an international envelope that is made available to the stores and to businesses that might want to save money on their international delivery. Our international envelope is a 2- and 3-day envelope that is about 30% to 40% less expensive than the more commonly-known competitors.
The third division of Universal Express, which was originally created for the postal stores, is our equipment leasing division, because we knew our trucks would need trucks and vans, and we knew that they needed equipment and candidly they’re small businessmen who don’t necessarily have the greatest credit status, so we knew we’d have to have somebody like a credit union to understand them. But, obviously, we also have other customers and clients outside the realm of the stores.
About nine months ago, Tom, the Wall Street Journal wrote a story about our luggage business and they said that we were the number one luggage service in America as per their test. When that occurred, we announced that we were creating a fourth division, which is called Universal Express Transportation. Subsequent to that, we have announced some capital fundings that we are working on and some letters of intent that we are working on and we’re hopeful in the very near future to be able to announce some actual brick-and-mortar transportation companies that will enable our luggage business to continue to be the premier luggage business in this country. At the current time, we are in discussions with Homeland Security and Congressional people, as to the possibilities of changing the way that Americans do view luggage in the paradigm of travel.
Sorry to be so long winded in your first question, but Universal Express is a large, growing conglomerate, so it does become difficult to capsulate.
Tom: All right, well that’s not a problem at all. Now the next question is, and it’s really not a question – your business generates revenues and profits. In fact, just yesterday Universal Express released news, an increase of 550% in revenues over the last year. Can you comment on this?
Mr. Altomare: Certainly it’s a nice percentage and of course, in this economy, people would think that’s a remarkable increase. But being honest and being straightforward, this is a development company. Many of the programs and products that we have put into motion do take time before they take seed. Anybody who’s ever had a garden realizes that you plant the seeds, you water it, the sun comes on it, and it seems forever before it breaks through the soil. I think that our credit card division, which is part of our leasing division, has not yet broken through the soil and yet early indications are that it’s going to even increase the numbers that you’ve been kind enough to talk about.
Our leasing company does $4 million a month in business. Now, that’s perplexing to people because when they look at our Qs and our Ks, they don’t see $4 million a month. It’s perplexing to us as well, I might add, but because they don’t have adequate banking credit facilities, our equipment leasing division – which is a $48 million division at this present time – is not permitted by law to book its business. It can only book the commissions and the profit that it makes because we can’t hold title to the business because we don’t have those credit facilities. Now, we’re working and we’re very close to finishing a credit facility. Once we do, we would say that a $1 million equipment leasing company becomes a $48 million leasing company and, of course, the world will think we’re a genius, but the reality is, it’s just the rules and regulations and the development of growth. World Post, our postal stores, has taken us a good eight years before we now feel that the revenue stream – it’s sort of like when you have a well in the back yard and in order to get the water to come up, you seem like you have to somehow suck that water until the power of the water begins to roll, sort of like when you try to get gasoline out of one car and put it in another car. I think that that itself is going to grow, so Universal Express, although it shows an increase of 500%, I’d like to say ‘you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ but remember, it’s very humble beginnings, it’s still in the early stages. I think that it’s perfectly normal for us to have big leaps and bounds like that. I don’t think that we did anything right this year, it’s just a question of systematic growth and the patience to wait for the individual entities to begin to take their rightful place in their competitive fields.
Tom: All right. Let me ask you this question then: What would be a fair valuation for your stock today, based on these numbers?
Mr. Altomare: I wish that I could tell you that. I can tell you that if we took our total issue and we divided that into our present revenue and profit stream, we could come up with a number together. However, naked shorting and the shorting process has somehow made this a little bit of an ambiguous question. If I have a hundred million shares short or ten million shares short or a billion shares short, that’s what determines the stock price and until the Securities and Exchange Commission is able to help young, developing companies on the over-the-counter exchange, to have their rightful capitalization, I don’t know that I can say. Do I think we’re a $1 stock, a $5 stock? Sure. Do I think that when one takes a look at our company and our executives and they visit our buildings and they see us moving and they see who we’re doing business with, are we more than a single-digit penny stock? Absolutely. There are companies that operate from a kitchen table that trade at higher numbers than this, but they clearly don’t have 20,000+ shareholders and 40+ market makers and a liquidity of five or six million shares a day. I think, Tom, that in the development of a company, and more so in this economic climate, the stock and the company are two separate entities in the early stages. Then there’s an event that occurs that somehow makes the two of them become one. In the case of Universal Express, I think that that event is when we announce something happening within our business models or something that we announce that we acquired, which bring our revenues up into larger numbers than two, four, five, six, ten million dollars in gross sales. That’s not going to scare away shorters. $100 million, $200 million, $500 million – that’s going to make shorters think that maybe they should leave us alone, but until that happens, I don’t know that I can answer that question. I mean, we’re clearly more than where we are; however, the market determines the price, not what the CEO wants.
Tom: All right. Now, let’s get into the naked shorting issue. How did you go about determining that your stock is being shorted, and before you answer that, I just want to comment that yesterday when the news did come out about the 550% increase in revenues, which is very significant, I don’t care how you look at it, the stock goes up a penny, a penny and a half and then by today already it’s basically returned back to where it was before.
Mr. Altomare: Yes. In answer to your first question – and thank you very much for observing that – I wish that I could tell you that it doesn’t sometime weaken the will of less resolved CEOs to watch what these naked shorters are capable of doing. Unfortunately for them, about five years ago, they stumbled upon the wrong company to do this to. Universal Express, at that time, Tom, was a $2 a share stock. We had total issue of five million shares. We were approached by what appeared to be a legitimate investment banking firm in Miami, Florida, that offered to do a $12 million funding -- $4 million in short-term funding and $8 million in long-term funding. Our attorneys, Thatcher Proffitt & Wood, Sullivan & Cromwell – some of the better law firms in this country – prepared the documents, so we know we did everything according to the way we would have been expected to do it, but when someone has larceny in their heart, there’s no paper in the world that’s going to prevent that. On the day that the accused, the individual that we put in prison, and then of course received a $500 million+ judgment against him and his firms and his partners, who headed up a consortium of individuals that were professional naked shorters. He raised $4 million from a bunch of investment people all over the world, disappeared – I have to underline that word for you, Tom – disappeared with the $4 million; we never received the money. But in exchange for the $4 million, as an agent of the company, he gave them what we would call convertible debentures. The next day, search engines all over the world just started to tell everyone about this wonderful company called Universal Express and how they should buy their stock. I mean, we traded an average of 22 million shares a day, for in excess of the next 140 days. Now some days we traded 60 million, but I’m just giving you an average of 22 million shares a day. Remind your listeners that we only had total issue of 5 million.
Tom: Right.
Mr. Altomare: We only had 336 shareholders at that time. It was a normal company, just walking down the road. We never thought – we didn’t enter into that to become the poster child for naked shorting. We were just trying to build a private postal system and to build a transportation paradigm that I think is quite interesting, especially because it’s outsourced and especially because no one else has ever approached it this way. So in answer to your question, five years ago, if you multiplied 22 million times 100 days and subtract that from the five million we had, we knew we were in the process of some form of naked shorting. We then prosecuted these individuals and the naked shorting numbers continued because our numbers were still the same, until we proved to a jury of our peers, through the numbers that we had available, through the DTC sheets and the trading sheets, that a terrible injustice had occurred. Not that it occurred against Universal Express, it’s that 16 companies before us went bankrupt with this same group of terrorists. When they went bankrupt, you and I know that these people never had to cover their shorts, so keep in mind, from $1.60 down to where they ended us at .02 cents, let’s say their average price was .70 cents a share or .50 cents a share or $1.00 a share, multiply 22 million a day times that number that they never covered, and that’s what they made from poor, unsuspecting investors all over the world. Now, multiply that by 10,000 or 15,000 companies a year, because it’s very simple, Tom. When you look at the bulletin board, 90% of those poor companies don’t make it. So these professional traders go after 100% of the small companies and they’re willing to pay on the 10 that make it and make the money on the 90 that don’t.
Tom: That’s right. Very good odds.
Mr. Altomare: It’s great odds – if I could go to a casino and bet on 9 out of 10, I’m willing to do that.
Tom: And you would stay at that casino probably 20 or 22 hours a day, too, wouldn’t you?
Mr. Altomare: You certainly would, until – if the Securities and Exchange Commission owned the casino, they would finally change the rules and protect the little companies because of one reason: little companies are the companies that generate jobs. And when stock prices fall, and CEOs have difficulty raising capital because their stock is falling, what happens but employees are lost. When you multiply that by the tens and tens and tens of thousands of companies that are presently being bombarded by this, now you see unemployment rates can change one or two or three percentage points by a simple Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement of proper rules and regulations. I don’t have a problem with shorting; shorting is very healthy. Naked shorting, for your listeners, is like me playing poker against you, I put my cards down and say “I have a pair of queens and a pair of sevens,” and you take the pot without showing me your cards and you say “I had three kings.” Now how long am I going to play poker with you before I start thinking this isn’t fair?
Tom: That’s not going to take long, now, is it?
Mr. Altomare: Unfortunately, it’s taken the Securities and Exchange Commission long to understand that small companies are the lifeblood of capitalism. Now, Universal Express did something terrible in this. We didn’t die. And because we didn’t die, because our business model is sound, we are able to survive and fight against these individuals and begin the turn around of awareness of this problem. When I was a high school teacher, I had an opportunity to be a baseball coach, and I remember the end of a baseball game, Tom, they would allow me to grade the umpire. Now, if I lost the baseball game, and I thought the umpire did a lousy job, as you know it often happens in sandlot games, everybody would say that I was just being a sore head, but when I won a game and I thought the umpire did a bad job, and then I rated him poorly, people tended to listen to me more because I won the game and I was still trying to tell them it was wrong.
Tom: Absolutely.
Mr. Altomare: Universal Express is going to win the game, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is going to have to listen. They might not want to listen, but we’re going to win the game, and the game is to make money for our shareholders to survive, to take the hundreds of thousands of paid chat room attacks against your character, your integrity, your family, your business model – whatever it takes, these animals do in order to get other individuals who are less sophisticated to get scared and to sell their stock to them at less of a price than what they already sold it at. In other words, they sell it at .09 cents, they write some bad news on the chat rooms, which is all gossip and hearsay, the stock goes to .07 cents and some of these shorters then buy it at .07 so they made .02 cents. The naked shorters, they don’t even care about it; they figure they’re going to put you out of business so they’re going to take it every day, and you’re going to support their families every day. The difference is Universal Express is going to be one of the ones that can get on the other exchange and we’re going to be the ones that are going to force the hundreds of millions or billions of shares that this company is short and we’re going to find, with the help of the regulators because the good guys know that we’re what they want to back, so again, so when did we know? God, five years ago. Did we enter into this situation willingly? Absolutely not. You know that old cliché “when you’re up to you ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember you came to clean out the swamp?” Well, I can tell you we came here to build a transportation company that the world will be proud of. We’re continuing to do that. Unfortunately, along the way, we met some naked shorters and we got thrown and then we became public enemy number one of the naked shorters, because I put their leaders in prison, and I got a half a billion dollar judgment against them. So, do they have a vested interest in doing whatever they can to show anyone else that you can’t fight against the town bully? Well, they sure do! But I will tell you one thing, that bully picked the wrong little kid in the school yard, because this little kid in the school yard – maybe his Brooklyn upbringing, maybe his Marine Corp training, maybe just his insane tenacity, or maybe just luckily – a business model that won’t die and they picked the wrong one and we’re going to fight it. We know that when congressmen and senators and people hear this story by the coach who wins, not by the companies that go out of business, even though half of them could still be around if they had been given an opportunity, which they’re not being given now, it’s not a fair playing field. And I’m sorry that I get off on that soapbox but when you say the word “naked shorting” I’m sort of like Abbott and Costello with " slowly I turned" .
Tom: Yeah, and you actually went right on through and answered most of my questions.
Mr. Altomare: Listen, I don’t blame you for wanting to get me off, but…
Tom: Now, you mentioned the SEC and I want to go into that. With regard to the SEC, this seems to have become quite an issue and the press releases of the last couple or two or three days, can you give us the details on the SEC’s involvement with you so far?
Mr. Altomare: Tom, all I can say about the Securities and Exchange Commission, is that it’s a very, very dedicated group of individuals who, for the most part, have the best interests of the shareholders and the companies at the core of their existence. I believe that the rules and regulations need to adjust to changes in our electronic society and I believe also that even within a good police department you can once in a while get a few police officers that don’t belong there. I think that we might find, and I certainly don’t know if that is true, but we might find that these naked shorters could have friends that benefit the naked shorters by being involved in the Securities and Exchange Commission, and I think that they need to regulate the Securities and Exchange Commission because giving an individual a badge can enable that individual with the badge to create fear and self-doubt amongst shareholders and even amongst company officials themselves, which weakens the resolve of a company that’s fighting against naked shorters. And every once in a while, we’ve all heard the story of a bad cop. We’ve heard the story of bad this and bad detectives – I’m not above believing that there might not be a few bad guys within the ranks of the very respected and very dedicated Securities and Exchange Commission. We, in our press release, received a two-day subpoena from an individual in the Denver office, a two-day subpoena, to prove to the Securities and Exchange Commission that naked shorting exists. This is a problem that is decades old. Tens of thousands of volumes of paper have been discussed. The Securities and Exchange Commission directors themselves have not only admitted it exists, but have made statements on what they plan to do in the near future to help us. But this individual, who with the advice of counsel, I’m just saying “individual,” gave us a two-day subpoena. This is not a friend of a developing company. This is not a friend of capitalism. I don’t know anyone in any state, any lawyer that would tell you that they have ever received a two-day subpoena on anything and certainly a two-day subpoena without extension. That is harassment. That is retaliation. That is an abuse of power. Now, I have no problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but I have a problem with that one individual, and that one individual is going to have to answer not only to me and not only to every other company that he has sworn an oath to protect, but he’s going to have to answer to congressional and senatorial individuals because in the very near future, they’re going to see a list of congressmen and senators that are going to request an investigation into the Denver office. Once again, you make sure you know who you’re picking a fight with.
Tom: Now, how long do you think, and you’ve mentioned the congressional involvement here – how long do you think that it might take to resolve this situation?
Mr. Altomare: You know, if we use the words ‘this situation,’ Tom, are we talking about shorting or are we talking about the Denver office?
Tom: Well, I’m talking about everything. How long --
Mr. Altomare: I can only tell you that I can only control those things in life that I know I have control over. I can only bring to the forefront the truth and the perception of the small developing company and I think that question can maybe be better answered by the individuals whose names appear on the appropriate documents that will be sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They might be better able to answer how long. All I know is that I’m prepared to take the first steps.
Tom: Okay. Well, we certainly do appreciate that. Now finally, Mr. Altomare, where may investors go to get more information on your company, specifically?
Mr. Altomare: Well, Universal Express has a stock symbol, that is USXP, and then if you’ll forgive my Marine Corp phonetics, that’s Uniform Sierra X-ray Papa, and we have a website that’s www.USXP.com, and on that website there are analyst reports on the company, there’s an executive summary that certainly does a better job than I’m sure I did today in explaining an overview of the company, because the company is a changing, growing organism. It’s a very exciting institution to be around. I feel sorry for it sometimes that it – it’s sort of like the tough kid on a block, didn’t get a lot of easy ropes, didn’t get an IPO, it didn’t get a lot of money left to it. As a matter of fact, when we began this endeavor, we were $52 million in debt and we, today, have no debt that we have to pay back on any regular basis. We’re in a fine financial position; we have wonderful hopes and dreams of the future, yet it has been a very difficult road because along the way we got picked on by a bunch of bullies that – if you think it’s tough enough to go against established transportation companies with no money – that we did, that’s pretty good – and 17 years later we’re being ranked up there in the top 10 in many categories as a transportation entity, but along the line, to not only have to fight against competitors, we’ve had to fight against a reasonably challenging economy and on top of that, we’ve got the town bullies that have picked us as the one, because we received a judgment that has attacked their bosses and their bosses do not want to pay and they do not want, when we find the money, for us to be around because if we’re not around then their judgment never has to be collected. All I can tell you is Universal Express is very much around and come the middle of October, you’ll see us in Washington in some very, very interesting presentations that you will read press releases on and I think that Universal Express is on the cutting edge of the transportation world.
If I may conclude with one statement, our corporate slogan is “While other shipping companies move boxes, we will continue to think outside of them,” and that double untondra of “them” means the box as well as our competitors, so we’ve done a marvelous job in the creation of our own retail chain of trade association stores with no monthly overhead because they’re individually owned. We’ve got a luggage service that is second to none as per the Wall Street Journal. We’ve got an equipment leasing company that has been growing at the rate of millions of dollars monthly. And we now have a credit card division that is booking up to 10,000 cards monthly and as those numbers begin to catch up to our Qs and Ks because we receive money for transactions, people will say, “My goodness, where did that come from?” I said in a Channel 7 interview recently, “Presently we have a corporate logo and a corporate slogan, but I wish that we could use a glacier or an iceberg in a visual of us, because what people see above the surface of the water is nothing compared to what is being built down below. Now our job is to get that glacier up above the surface of the water so that everyone can see it. That’s what we’re trying to do, and we thank the naked shorters for gaining additional visibility for people to see what’s here.
Tom: Well, thank you so much, Mr. Altomare. We want to thank you for taking the time to do the interview today. Very, very good information on not only your company, but the naked shorting situation, which is a serious problem in our economy.
Mr. Altomare: I agree, Tom, and it’s not just about Universal Express. There are tens of thousands of poor CEOs more qualified than myself who, today, might not even have companies because of these terrorists that have done more damage to our infrastructure than the 19 terrorists that hit us in New York City.
Tom: Well, I certainly agree with you on that point and, once again, thank you very much.
Mr. Altomare: Thank you for taking the time; we certainly appreciate it.
End
CIAO
