IDT Corporation Chairman Howard Jonas Addresses Shareholders

With all of the recent bad news and rapidly declining stock prices, IDT Chairman Howard Jonas decided to have a conference call on Thursday to address many of the issues and declare that the company is poised to be profitable in the near future, a feat that they have not been able to accomplish in more than 14 years. The call itself seemed to have two purposes, one explain how and why they were heading towards being in the "black" and two allowing the Chairman to tout his new and prized possession, the Shale oil company AMSO.

The companies Telecom unit is in the process of performing a lot of cost cutting measures which should help it reflect the smaller pie which is the phone card business. This was the first time that I know of that IDT admitted that the phone card business decline was not just a temporary thing but an overall shift downwards in the market. They still blamed the unfair practices a little but seemed to imply that they feel the business is now close to stabilized and should not be declining any further... Being that IDT was the lead on the "cleaning up the phone card business" maybe this means that we will see a reduction in state and federal government investigations into these businesses??

Jonas also sounded optimistic that a key deal with "one of the largest telecom providers" could be likely and if that deal goes through should make IDT into one of "the leading terminator of international calls and leading seller prepaid products" in the world. While Jonas stressed that this deal was in no way certain, just by them talking about it, might suggest that the company feels strongly that the deal has a good possibility (otherwise why get people's hopes up...).

Other topics of the call included Zedge, their food company, and of course AMSO Shale Oil... a subject that dominated the call but being that this is a telecom blog, I will leave this topic alone. If you would like to read the unofficial transcript to this call you can view it on the Silicon Investor blog.