Tintri closes EMEA offices in bid to stave off bankruptcy

Eighty per cent of staff laid off as leaderless flash storage company fights for survival

Tintri, the flash storage company that only floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange one year ago, has shut its entire European operations as it bids to avoid Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The closures will leave customers in the EMEA region without support, while staff have told The Register that they were laid off without either pay or redundancy terms. It comes after the company admitted last week that it had axed 80 per cent of staff in a bid to preserve what little cash reserves the company has left.

In all, 200 employees have lost their jobs, including customer support staff in Ireland, leaving just 50 or so at the company. "Clients are basically fucked," one former Tintri employee told The Register.

According to Olivier Metzger, a senior systems engineer at Tintri, based in Switzerland, the axe fell a week ago on Friday.

However, according to The Register, only some staff have been paid for June: it reports that staff in the US, Switzerland, Ireland and South Africa were all paid, while staff in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands went without.

The company's stock price, meanwhile, has been in freefall since March, with the current price pegged at just 20 cents today, down from a peak of $7.31 in January, and a high of $6.63 in March.

In the year to the end of January, its 10K filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that while sales throughout the year had been flat, in the final three months revenues had crashed by 29 per cent, compared to the same period a year earlier.

It also revealed that the company was burning through its IPO proceeds at an alarming rate. In June an 8K filing made clear how parlous the company's financial condition really was with the news that it was in breach of its agreement with its contract manufacturer Flextronics, and had been given 15 days to make good arrears.

Also in June in its preliminary first quarter 2019 results release, the company admitted that at its current burn rate it would be out of business before the end of the month, revealing that it had churned through $19.4 million of its $30.9 million reserves during the month of May alone.

The executive team weren't transparent - they never talked about how much cash we were burning or the current state of the company

"As of April 30, 2018, and May 31, 2018, Tintri held aggregate cash and cash equivalents of $30.9 million and $11.5 million, respectively.

"Based on the company's current cash projections, and regardless of whether its lenders were to choose to accelerate the repayment of the company's indebtedness under its credit facilities, the company likely does not have sufficient liquidity to continue its operations beyond June 30, 2018," the statement admitted.

The company's management blame a sales slowdown that, they say, started prior to its IPO, which has accelerated throughout the past year. But The Information reports that rank-and-file staff blame "management missteps and discord between the executive leadership and other top executives".

The company is now rudderless after the departures of two CEOs in the past six months, while chief financial officer Ian Halifax left in April. The company has yet to name a new CEO or CFO.

Staff, though, blamed mismanagement. "The executive team weren't transparent - they never talked about how much cash we were burning or the current state of the company," a former Tintri employee told The Information. "Sometimes they would say, your job is to sell, ours is to worry about the business'."