Vonage may take stock buyback hit

You'll remember that Vonage went public recently at $17/share, and that the stock has been sinking since. (It closed yesterday at $12.32, off a June 1 low of $11.52.) As part of the IPO, Vonage reserved a bunch of stock for some of its customers. When the stock's price dropped pretty much out of the box, some of those customers said they wouldn't pay up; Vonage promised underwriters that they'd make good for the deadbeats. Now it looks like Vonage made some technical mistakes in the way it promoted the stock to those customers in the first place, which means Vonage may have to buy those shares back at the original $17 price. No one's saying yet how much the goof may cost.

For more information about the Vonage IPO:
- read this article from Computer Business Review Online