Bear Stearns CC
by: EquityVal 5/4/00 9:51 am
Msg: 37812 of 37818
Bear Stearns is having a "virtual" satellite conference by phone today and Bernie was the leadoff speaker. Here are the headlines:
-he caveated the whole presentation by saying that data was only available for a few weeks of service and that it was hard to extrapolate from it
-phone usage in April in selected countries was 118K minutes for the month (he indicated this was an average of 8 countries 6 at beginning of month, 10 by end, I'm assuming these are the most advanced from a rollout standpoint)
-he reiterated that they can't tell which minutes are revenue and which are non revenue.
-he said mobile phone usage was 140 min/month which I assume to include both paying and non paying phones - combining this with the above usage numbers implies about 850 phones in regular usage
-he said there were 73K phones "in the system" which I assume means built and shipped or ready to ship
-nothing said about the status of fixed phones
-25 countries were in service (system working, phones in dist) as of 3/31, 36 as of now and 11 more to be added by June
-China and Moscow area of Russia coming on line by end of May, UK lauch event with Chris Gent on May 24
-Cash at 3/31 was $232MM. He said that without revenue or extension of the credit agreement, they need $160MM to get to year end. No word on status of bank agreement
-data service will be commercially available Q3 (a slip from the previous target of Q2)
More words from Bernie:
-Airtouch starts 2nd phase of mkting program today 20% funded by GLP and 80% by AT
-Ramp in Australia very strong, last 3 weeks of April up 6x (not clear if that was usage, subs or what), and good news for Maurice, they have ordered a 4th GW for NZ
-phones have been sold to 15 gov't agencies (which I infer to be US agencies) including Marines, Army & AF. In discussion about transitioning the Iridium subs in military
-7 provincial gov'ts in Canada have purchased
-Red Cross has ordered 100 phones
-phones were used by: FBI in Egypt Air crash, UN forces in Kosovo, French flood relief, Brazilian police during Carnival, and by the San Diego police
-also interest from Native American reservations
-two blanket statements during call "introductroy build up may be slower than expected" and "all early trends moving in right direction"
-when pressED about when more substantive statistics would be available, he said they should have solid usage/sub data after Q2
-in response to a question about where additional funds would come from he said the partners are ready to fund G*
-in reponse to a question about how many phones QCOM had produced/shipped he said that phone demand varied siginficantly between distributors and that they were sending people out into the field to try to understand this - TB be ready for that call from Tony, sounds like they need ground troops.
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