Regardless of what the future may hold for the company, there have been a number of posts on the boards that in my opinion are silly, to be polite. Those posters have said, in effect, that "Valence has bragged all these years about how good their manganese-based cells are, but now they're switching to phosphate!" The message they're trying to convey is that it's all been hype, the cells were no good, and now they're forced to try another chemistry. This is like blaming the computer makers for producing 286's when they eventually ended up switching to Pentiums. Or Henry Ford for making the Model T when he later made more advanced cars.
Whatever role the company sees for itself in the future, up to this point they wanted to become the "Qualcom of the battery industry", an R&D company, and as such they've carried on research into new chemistries in parallel with their work on the manganese cells. It seems to have paid off. While we don't know much about the phosphate cells, we've been told they provide better energy density and greatly increased cycling over the manganese units. With the increasing activity we now seem to have in battery development world wide, every advantage in overall performance that Valence can glean out of their batteries will be needed if they hope to get a reasonable share of the market. Their belief is that the phosphate cells provide significant improvements, and perhaps a small cost advantage to boot.
How they address the other aspects of this business is another topic.
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