<font color=green>MOU Sold. Since Globalstar doesn't know how many MOU there are on any day, here's my guess for cumulative MOU in millions:
Dec99 Start of service in a couple of places.
Mar00 .5
Jun00 1x
Sep00 4xxxx
Dec00 8xxxxxxxx
Mar01 depends on marketing plans and let's see how Sep00 goes.
This time last year, Bernie was expecting 40,000 handsets a month by the beginning of Y2K which shows the disastrous state of marketing compared with the plan.
<August 7, 1999
...In January 2000, approximately 16 gateways are to be in operation, and 22 additional gateways are scheduled to come on stream throughout 2000. A sufficient number of telephones, manufactured by Ericsson, Qualcomm and Telital, should be in the distribution pipeline in the fourth quarter, with telephone production ramping up to 40,000 units per month by early 2000.>
We should now be at 360,000 subscribers. We are actually about one year behind the marketing plan. That adds about $500 million to the total cost of the system - okay, round it up to $1 billion. That's not good, but it's not the end of the world. The opportunity cost is worse than that.
The good thing is that the gears and gizzards are all spinning nicely along.
Mqurice
PS: Jetter, I'm not celebrating getting some more money. That is NOT what I what we are trying to achieve. I am interested in selling minutes. True, I want to know that rollout is continuing too and that SCADA, IFN, etc continue to develop. But the biggie is MOU. Financing is a bit of a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. If customers are coming, so will the financing. If they don't, it won't.
If you think shorts are dealing in a liquid market, your definition of liquid and mine are two different things.
It's questionable to think shorts were right that G! would run out of money - except for that cunning Lockheed financing. Ooops, now another weird financing too. It doesn't really matter how it happens, it happened. You are theoretically correct that Globalstar is now bankrupt, but factually incorrect. Bankruptcy courts and investment returns deal are objective reality and not hypothetical stories about what might have been. Globalstar did not and will not run out of money in Y2K either hypothetically, or in reality.
You'd better match your investments up with reality, not conjecture. Same as longs and Globalstar need to line their investments up with the reality of missing customers. The market research can say that there are a million subscribers signed up now, but I'll believe the gateways when they tell us how many are connected and how many MOUs were used. |
