SiliconBeat

Ampex, the long-time, once-venerable Silicon Valley company that pioneered recording media, got the OK Friday from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on the its reorganization plan. Not a surprise, of course, as those creditors “entitled” to vote on the plan approved it “overwhelmingly” back in July, according to the press release Ampex put out this morning. ) No word on what those creditors who weren’t entitled to vote think about the plan. Or the stockholders of the pre-bankruptcy Ampex, who are out of luck.

The company also reported receiving $5 million in new funding from Read the rest of this entry »

Ampex, one of the oldest companies in Silicon Valley, told the Nasdaq stock market Thursday that it no longer wants to appeal the stock exhange’s decision to delist its stock, according to a release the Redwood City company put out Thursday. The decision to remove the company’s stock from trading on the Nasdaq market was a result of Ampex filing for protection under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on March 30. Read the rest of this entry »

Ampex told its recent pen pal and biggest investor, ValueVest — which has been exchanging testy correspondence with Ampex for months about the best way for the company to exploit its sizable patent portfolio — that it won’t be answering it’s letters anymore, at least not in writing, according to a filing it made Wednesday.

ValueVest has been particularly ticked off lately about tentative plans Ampex has made with Hillside Capital, a company that manages Ampex’s pension fund. Ampex is seeking to restructure payments toward the $45 million it owes Hillside, and one idea includes the issuance of more Ampex stock in exchange.

ValueVest, which owns about 13.4 percent of Ampex’s shares, is not very keen on the idea. In a letter it sent the company Dec. 6 the investment firm said that Ampex could easily pay the $14.2 million of the debt to Hillside that is due over the next two years by enacting a number of ”commercially sensible transactions” that would not require the company to dilute the current shareholders’ stakes in Ampex.

”This arithmetic completely ignores the substantial value that we continue to believe the Company can and should generate through additional licenses and other monetizations of its intellectual property assets,” the ValueVest letter said.

In its reply delivered Dec. 10, Ampex told the firm that ”Your letter purports to present an assessment of Ampex’s financial health based on a combination of inaccuracies and selected publicly-available data. Your conclusions are not accurate.”

The Ampex reply concluded: ”While we welcome input from shareholders and will continue to engage in a dialogue with all of our constituents, we do not intend to respond in writing to further correspondence from ValueVest.”

Ampex (ticker:AMPX) announced its third quarter earnings on Wednesday. But the numbers weren’t as interesting as this scary little word that appeared below them: Bankruptcy!

We’ve been following the travails of Ampex over the past few months. Once one of the Valley’s leading innovators, the company has been mostly focused in recent years on how to use its vast patent portfolio to extract royalty payments from other company.

Ampex had reached a tentative agreement with a company that manages its pension fund to restructure some payments. The hitch: Ampex needed to raise $15 million from other investors as a condition of the deal.

According to the company’s press release, filed as an 8-K on Thursday, Ampex doesn’t think it will be able to raise that $15 million by the deadline of Nov. 15. That could kill the deal. And if that happens, the company warns:

“There can be no assurance that we will be able to successfully restructure our indebtedness. If we are unable to restructure our indebtedness or unable to otherwise service our indebtedness, we might be forced to reorganize under federal bankruptcy laws, which could negatively affect our revenues and the price of our Common Stock.”

We’ll see if this turns out to be a near-death experience. But it seems a big patent auction could be looming.

We’ve followed with great interest the continuing saga of Ampex (ticker:AMPX) and its ongoing butting of heads with its largest shareholder, ValueVest of San Francisco.

For months, the two sides have been going back and forth over how best to exploit the vast patent portfolio amassed by Ampex. This culminated in an unorthodox hostile bid by ValueVest to buy Ampex patents and spin them off into a new company.

But now ValueVest is making nice. In a 13-D/A filed on Wednesday, the company disclosed that it was possibly willing to help the company as it renegotiates its payments to fulfill its pension obligations. In July, Ampex was notified that it was possibly in default on those payments, something that could have caused an even greater cash crunch at the company.

It appears that Ampex has reached a deal with the pension company, Hillside, that requires it to raise more equity. ValueVest said it would consider helping raise the necessary money. Of course, that love is not unconditional. In the filing, a ValueVest manager writes:

“Any such assistance would, however, be contingent upon the Investment Manager being satisfied with (Ampex’s) future operating plans, management and board of directors.”