Bob, if nothing short of a press release saying "Bob Jordan, please be advised that IDX shipped x DFR-300s on [date]" will satisfy you, so be it. You should know by now that unlike NRID/ESAF, which has a history of issuing press releases any time its CEO burped, IDX tends to announce its deals after the fact. The most recent egregious example of that was an internet banking deal in Peru, I believe. There is plenty of evidence that the DFR-300 is shipping. Personally, I really doubt the DFR-200 could be shipping in volume two months after the next generation reader was announced, overhanging the market.
"You said you heard of a production delay...could you elaborate?" What I said was "I think there has been a minor production delay." That's based on, as you noticed, the lack of a specific announcement. If the product were shipping in early December, I think we would have seen something about volume shipping that month. But given the available information out this month that it is shipping, I conclude the delay was minor. Further, the shipping that is going on, I strongly suspect, is to re-load the sales channels. I'm waiting to see end user announcements along with everyone else, but it's far from clear to me that the first breakthrough sale has been made.
Pricing: The $99 price is the retail price CPQ charges for one at a time sales. While I don't know what there price is in retail quantities, I have seen it published somewhere that CPQ sells the FIT DFR-200 for less in quantity, as you might expect. The $99 price has to include hardware, algorithm, application, CPQ resale expenses and profit margin. My belief is that IDX was able to do the DFR-200 for $35 from a subcontractor (including license fee to IDX), and then charged $12 or so for the algo and application (keeping in mind CPQ also had a hand in designing the application). Once again, I have seen a published report that CPQ expects the overall price on the DFR-300 FIT will be around $60, maybe as little as $50 in high quantities. Obviously, IDX will look for the sweet spot on the demand curve and, in higher volumes, will be willing and able to drop its algo and app prices to OEMs. This isn't crazy: supermarkets can make a whole lot of money even though their resale markup is very thin, since they turn over inventory very quickly and only pay attention to the profit/overhead ratio. As sales increase, overhead as a percentage of sales drops, enabling lower prices to be quite profitable for the supplier. And you would see economies of scale in production of the hardware.
I haven't seen the published pricing on the Secugen reader, but since they are using a SAF application, I'm assuming that $70 can't be for more than the hardware and, maybe, the algorithm. It can't include the user interface app, or any OEM resale markup. Therefore, a $70 price is hopelessly too high to compete with either the DFR-200 (est. $35) or the DFR-300 (est. $19). Probably a complete solution retail price for a Secugen at that price would approach $200. |
