You are all most welcome.
As I listened to the CC it struck me as somber and maybe I was just transferring my mood to their words <g>,
but as Frank on reading it says it was 'heartening'& I have to agree, a little. Yes the corpus is alive but my pulse didn't quicken much even with the reread.
Still I, and I am sure some of you, laughed at one point: the Ed Stark 'unlocking ECD's hidden assets' question>Stan's quick 'YES' and then Stempel's 'Next question'. Stan spoke softly at many points and off mike so he was hard to hear at times but Stan still sounds like he believes what he is saying.
As an investor I am trying to understand Stan's beliefs. For example, how can 1000 miles of 8.5% PV equal only 30 MW?
This is a nagging question for me and no I haven't received an answer/callback from the source, so far.
The GE Ovonic JV has never seemed to be on GE's front-burner and now at a standstill to reconsider BluRay, taxes my ability to understand without more details. BluRay (just violet laser diode powerful enough to heat the chalcogenide) has been expected for past several years with developments from Nichia, BluRay commercialization was leaking out into the investor boards last Jan, and in Feb. Sony announced they would produce the format and later set up a consortium of manufacturers. GE Ovonic has always known that DVD disks with capacity to record/store 2+ hours of HDTV was the consumer holy grail and knowing that, must have anticipated this BEFORE NOW and should be deciding not if/when but how many/how large manuf. plants they will build IMO. Many of you will remember Stan's letter to the Stockholders of Jan 2001 (on file with the SEC) where he values the JVs according to the partner's contribution and I was and am still bothered by the $14M valuation of that when GE then had only contributed $3M. Our 49% share is said to be due to our contribution of proprietary technology, etc. but I would like mention made in the same line that GE was awarded 400K warrants at the time of this JV that do not expire until 2010. That is a little more than just contributing our proprietary technology and know-how to the JV. Stan in that Jan 2001 letter also wrote:
"A near-term decision to build equipment for a small volume (5-10 million annual capacity) manufacturing facility is
anticipated in the coming months, and a longer-term plan includes the manufacture and sale of both disks and manufacturing equipment. The establishment of this manufacturing venture underscores our new strategy
to focus on manufacturing and sales rather than on licensing of others."
That anticipated near-term decision was echoed a year later in Jan 2002 by Nancy Bacon forecasting a small 3-5M disk machine by early 2003 and now we are almost to January 2003 and as Stempel says we're basically 'on hold'to consider the influence of BluRay despite the fact that Stempel states technically we can emboss disks 24X faster than the rest of the industry. We have been told our R-T-R process can produce whatever flavor of disks the market wants: from DVD ROM, to DVD-R,any DVD-rewritable format, CD R/RW/multilevel, BluRay, UDO! Formats change but sales continue to grow, just not ours. BTW, to date has GE coughed up $7M to match that $14M valuation for the JV? Hence my reference to Bayer the other day, they too are working on optical disk thin film and if GE doesn't assign sufficient priority to our JV, then I would expect management to seek another partner. What is supposed to be motivating this is the fact that ECD knew it was headed for $66K in disk royalties unless it started manufacturing the disks in-house, hence the ATP award back in 1997 with its' 'successful outcome', as we have all read and been told, resulting in the formation of GE Ovonic to manuf. ultrahighspeed... now in pause mode.
As for the 30MW tweaking, I figure this beast gobbles up tons of materials daily and why not get the last scintilla of stabilized efficiency out of it in the Fall before you fully unleash it for the 2003 sales season? The engineers and scientists are optimizing the machine and why shouldn't they increase revenues by tweaking, since it adds no material/labor/energy costs to the MW output.
I do believe BESS has been focussing on marketing going back to 2000 and steadily bringing in new staff and much more so these past 6-9 months. Bekaert has sent senior staff to head up marketing/sales and I hope they run a tight ship.
I expect BESS is also working on offering a polymer roof PV, as made by Alwitra in Germany, for sales here in the US and if the clamped batten PV trials go well, then BESS will have another user-friendly product to offer the market.
All in all, I'm bullish on the machine, nervous about marketing challenges, excited about possible new PV products
and pleased that we're working now with Lockheed and Boeing on space PV arrays (anybody else notice the absence of a PR last October?) and perplexed that $40M is needed for operating capital for the next year when no such thing was said earlier by Bekaert or ECD or did I miss something in the last 500 pages of filings?<g>
Cheers,
Al |
