Inventory Liquidation

News out this past week included word that Liquidity Services cut 10% of its staff. This is just the latest blow to the battered company that has seen its stock drop 80% from its high of around $62/share in early 2012. With the most attractive component of the DoD contract moving over to Iron Planet, the company was left with the remaining piece (for non-rolling stock). Unfortunately for the company, they won this piece of the contract at a price roughly 3 times higher than they were previously paying. In addition, there is a significant amount of overhead needed to service this part of the contract that was previously amortizable across both contracts. On top of all this, the company has been struggling to hold onto accounts in their commercial business as well. Several of their most lucrative clients are actively exploring other alternatives. All-in-all, it has been a bad, bad year for the company.

Only folks working inside can speak to the level of distraction they are experiencing, but it undoubtedly contributed to the company's global site outage last week that lasted nearly 24 hours.

Here is their tweet about it:

In the end it appeared to be a global outage across all of their sites that lasted nearly 24 hours. Ouch.