[from the 04/25/2016 edition of Breakthrough Tech Weekly]

Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), which designs and sells a flash-optimized data storage platform, has been absolutely crushed so far this year. Shares have fallen by more than 14% after a couple of disappointing quarters.

The company believed its products would revolutionize the data storage market, combining fast retrieval with predictive analytics to speed the process even more, but Nimble has faced an uphill battle in a market that gets more competitive by the day. There are literally hundreds of companies hawking other solutions, and although Nimble’s system is unique, the company has struggled to get a toehold in the market. It’s so bad that CEO Suresh Vasudevan has repeatedly said that the ongoing price war in the data storage market is why the company has missed estimates.

Nimble isn’t expected to release first-quarter earnings until late May, but investors aren’t expecting an improvement. On the contrary, over the past three months analysts have revised estimates for this year sharply lower, widening the company’s expected loss per share from 47 cents to 73 cents. Next year’s estimate also was slashed from an expected profit of 4 cents to a loss of $20 cents.

Nimble has been in our Next Wave Portfolio for more than a year and half, and in that time its share price has plunged from close to $30 to about $7.80 today. At this point, the odds that we’ll recover that lost ground are long, even if the company were to blow expectations out of the water.  But that seems unlikely, as the company’s own guidance was lackluster.

After rising decently in the fourth quarter to $90.1 million, revenue should range between $83 million and $86 million in the first quarter. The company expects to post an adjusted net loss per share between 25 cents and 27 cents. That’s roughly in line with past first-quarter performances, a seasonally weak time of year for Nimble, but frankly still not good enough for a company that’s been in business for nearly a decade now. Given the sharp plunge in Nimble’s share price, other investors are tired of waiting for the company to turn a profit, too.

Sell Nimble Storage.