The building at 110 N. Main St. (foreground) and Stratacache Tower (background). Chris Riegel, Stratacache CEO, said Thursday, May 7, he is selling the former building, along with a building across Main Street on Courthouse Plaza. FILE
Dayton-based retail technology company Stratacache is liquidating operations in the United Kingdom, but the company’s founder and chief executive says the move does not affect his American operations.
“No impact on the USA,” CEO Chris Riegel told the Dayton Daily News in a text message on Monday May 25. “We are right-sizing the business. Labor and component costs (are) on the rise. We have to adjust accordingly.”
“Several pilots (pilot programs) didn’t pencil out based on surge in (costs of) labor and components,” he said.
The global company has laid off employees this year, Riegel has acknowledged, but he has told the Dayton Daily News Stratacache was profitable last year.
Riegel has said Stratacache is working to navigate what he called a “global memory spike,” a reference to the cost of random access memory, or RAM, which can be found in a multitude of technologies consumers use.
Artificial intelligence companies like Anthropic, Google and others use RAM to drive their servers in huge data centers. This growing demand across sectors has been driving up prices for memory, affecting smaller companies.
Stratacache has also been selling large properties. Riegel is having a firm auction off the company’s downtown buildings at 10 N. Ludlow St. and the former Premier Health tower at 110 N. Main St. in Dayton.
Stratacache is liquidating Stratacache U.K. as well as PRN U.K., according to public records, Adweek reported on its web site.
The Grocer web site said that Stratacache U.K. owes nearly 13 million English pounds to creditors. The site also reported that a digital media deal with an English supermarket, Iceland Foods, has ended.
But Riegel told the Dayton Daily News that debt number is inaccurate. “Lots of the reporting is out of context,” he wrote. “It’s not debt in the way you think about debt.”
He said most of the debt is owed to U.S.-based Stratacache, the parent company of Stratacache U.K.