nova

Nova's quarterly report [pdf] for the period of April to June 2007 has been released and the results are not encouraging.

More grist for the Nova rumor mill has turned up in a post on a Yahoo!

This week's edition of the Toyo Keizai, a business mag along the lines of Forbes or Business Week, has an article that savages Nova portraying it as being run by a man constantly pulling tricks out of his hat to keep the company limping along. It doesn't get any worse than this. Here's a translation of the article.

The end of the road for Nova's business practices as cash flow crunch intensifies

With METI sanction and repeated missed payments, Nova stands at a precipice

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, Nova is still using its old refund method and ripping off its customers even after the Tokyo metropolitan government warned it to clean up its act.

Under Nova's old refund scheme, unused, expired points were not refundable. When students purchased additional tickets, the expiry date for the tickets was extended, but when a contract was canceled, the new date applied to the newly purchased tickets only and not the tickets that were carried over.

Nova has lost in court again. This should come as no surprise given the mountain of bad publicity surrounding the way it deceived and ripped off its customers.

According to the Nikkei, on August 7, USB Japan apparently purchased 8 million shares of Nova stock, and then loaned the shares to its bank, UBS AG, the same day.

As already mentioned in comments and ,

. [PDF] and a whopping 2% on your investment.

As has been widely reported in the media, the number of complaints about Nova keep piling up. According to reports, in the three months from April to June, there have been 1803 complaints, which rivals the 1935 complaints lodged for all of last year.

Of the complaints, 70% or 1249 haven been resolved through lawyers providing information or counseling, whereas the National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan has resolved 62 complaints.

Nova needs a miracle to get out of the hole it's in.

Here's the last bit of the METI press release on Nova's punishment. The PDF document contains the translation of the entire METI press release, including the the charts on the last two pages. The quality of the flow chart in the PDF isn't excellent, but it's still readable. I've attached the flow chart by itself just in case.