The following video excerpt was taken from an interview with Steve Swad, CEO of Rosetta Stone (RST), in which he talks about his business philosophy, and how it is driving success both for language learners and for the company itself. In this segment, he discusses low past stock performance and the path to higher numbers.
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Matt Argersinger: I want to talk a little bit about the stock price for Rosetta Stone. It's not been a great performer since the IPO. Are there maybe two or three reasons in your mind why it hasn't been a successful investment? Was it timing or has it been just business-related mostly?
Steve Swad: Oh, I think some of the investments we made didn't pay off the way we had hoped. When we first introduced TOTALe and brought Live into our product offering, we had hopes for expanded top line and that didn't happen. And ReFLEX, we had hoped for expanded top line; that didn't happen. Or it didn't happen as soon as we thought. And so I've been working on clearer transparency with the Street and just very defined goals, and then reporting to the Street, and we're finding that the Street is accepting that approach of slow, steady growth with some margin expansion along the way.
