Jacques and Kai,
Kai, on Hanil the revenue recognition last Q was almost
certainly accounting only, no cash from Hanil. Vlnc had
$2.5 defered revenue which was money they got up-front
from Hanil to cover their expenses in helping to bring up
Hanil. Advanced payment against future revenues. They
must have ended up billing Hanil by the hour for tech
support and expenses, maybe plus a licensing fee. Hanil
had no choice and almost certainly did not pay any more
cash. It's been long evident that Hanil was going nowhere
fast, Stephan may not give a rat's ass about them -
Samsung is the only licensing play that really matters,
and a far better Korean partner i would add. Panasonic
might come into the camp later, based on Phosphates and
if the have $$$ for the CapEx to build mfg lines.
The really big difference in Stephan's plan which makes it
so much more credible than Lev's: Lev started insisting
that licensing the phosphates was were they would be making
most of their money. Stephan says FY2003 will be highly
weighted towards licensing but only because the up-front
phosphate licenses will be large. His plan makes tons more
sense because as he stated, they can make tons more $$$
building their own batteries. This is a major shift and
it makes very good sense, so much so that Lev's plan was
nonsense in fact. But it seems obvious that Lev kinda lost
it in the end because he just could not sell the batteries
and so lost confidence that they would ever sell out the
capacity of NI. It was a major disconnect for me that
Lev turned to "we are a technology company" and stopped
talking about NI except for plans to sell it. Clearly
without the revenues from production in NI they can't make
it with their present expense structure, even take away
NI expense, their R&D alone costs $4MM/Q.
Jacques, re the shares sold off the shelf determining a
level for the stock, we could well end up in a situation
we've seen before where the company holds off altogether
or does 'just in time' financing of smaller amounts just
to keep going until they can announce the business they
are working on and sell the stock at a higher price.
with $20MM from Berg, they will be in exactly that
position if they meet their goal and get the design win
we are looking for. |
