| NANX Bought 3K...Nanophase Technologies (NANX) 6.50 +0.54: Company is being highlighted today by a major brokerage firm as a pure play on what it believes will be the next technological growth innovation -- nanotech. This is the science of fabricating things smaller than 100 nanometer (billionths of a meter)... Minuscule itself (market-cap only $87 mln), NANX is focused on the creation of nanostructured materials to enhance material properties and devise functions beyond those normally found in a material. These nanocrystalline materials generally are made of particles that are less than 100 nanometers in diameter. Because they contain only 1,000s or 10,000s of atoms, rather than the millions or billions of atoms found in larger size particles, the objects often display physical attributes substantially different from those found in bulk materials... Merrill Lynch believes that selected nanotech applications will become real over the next few years, including enhanced materials, hard drives, optical networking, computer chips, medical drugs, and genomic testing. NANX is joined in its pursuit of functional nanostructured materials by technology sector heavyweights such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. But NANX is currently the only publicly traded pure play in the space... Up to this point, the distinction has not yielded much in the way of revenues. In the most recent quarter, NANX posted a loss of $1.3 mln ($0.09 per share) on revenues of $1.1 mln. A limited number of key customers have accounted for the majority of NANX's commercial revenue. In particular, revenue from BASF Corp represented 68.5% of the total top-line in 2000... This is not the first time that nanotech has been highlighted as the next big innovation. Positive press has carried NANX shares to a high of $17.50 over the past year, and over a five month period commencing in Oct. of '99 catapulted the stock more than 1200%. This was another example of a stock price getting way ahead of the fundamentals. However, history has proven that once the fundamentals finally do kick in (usually 12-24 months after the initial excitement), the story reemerges, as does the stock. -- Damon Southward, Briefing.com |
