3/30 Investor Call Transcript (Part 4 of 4)
Len (Pacific Capital): I was wondering why you can’t answer how many employees you have or backlogged numbers?
Dearmin: At this point we do keep those number confidential. As far as the backlogged numbers, I really don’t want to go into that. I think we’ll be giving more detailed financials as we move out into the future. But I think our numbers will speak for themselves as they get posted.
Len: And also, I was wondering, you’d mentioned a line item in Congress. Can you comment further on that? I don’t quite understand what’s that, what is that saying?
Dearmin: Sure, there’s a big difference. When you’re actually… The Department of Defense has lots of money that’s they can spend on different projects and every different agencies within the DOD and the military services can decide what to spend money on them. They have their own pots of money. Actually in the 2004 budget bill, Congress has separate line item for our technology, specifically for Ionatron LIPC technology. And that is vastly different than just having someone within the military services decide to spend money with you.
Len: So you really don’t know what they’re talking about of a range of money they are going to spend with you?
Dearmin: On the Congressional side, until the budget actually gets signed, those numbers are speculative. But as we said, we expect the Congressional line item to be substantially greater in 2005 than in 2004. And that doesn’t count what the other services choose to spend with us under other line items that they may have.
Len: OK, this is a little off subject, but, other applications, are there, for instance, speeding up communication, internet phone, television? Has there been any look into that arena?
Dearmin: We are focused on this really one project. Yes, we are well aware there are numerous future applications for, certainly for our very unique compact laser sources, and then the compact laser sources actually creating these channels, and then conducting various pipes of energy down them. And we’ve done some experiments and have look at technology in those areas, and yes, we have a lot of people interested. But, we are trying to stay focus. We want to be the master of this particular part of it first and then we’ll move on to other segments of the technology, if you will.
Len: One more question. In regards to the patent issues, I know Lockheed, Boeing, and others are looking into the same field. Do you feel comfortable in your protective position at this moment?
Dearmin: We actually feel very, very comfortable. We’ve spent a good part of the first part of starting the company back in late 2001 and early 2002 looking at the patent portfolios. Ours very, very novel, it is fundamentally different, and the major defense contractors have become platform integrators, if you will. And it is our vision and what we believe from our conversations with some of the large defense contractors that it is beneficial for everyone if they would integrate our technology into their overall systems.
George Marshall: It’s sort of been asked and answered, but could you direct a laser induced plasma channel toward a lightning bolt, capture lightning, put it in a battery, and distribute electricity, that kind of a stuff?
Dearmin: That is a potential long term commercial goal of the technology. Yes, it is.
Jim Pete (Nolan Securities): Hi, just a couple of questions on the technology, which I understand that you hardly answered. But, I know that lasers run into lots of trouble when the weather is not perfect, if there is fog out, or if in a battlefield that there’s smoke. How effective is your technology in these kind of less than perfect conditions?
Dearmin: Without getting into any security issues, I can say that we have within our laboratory tested many of those adverse conditions and from our point of view had success in many of those areas.
Jim: Over what kind of distance? Is this a short range weapon, or is this something that can be used over distance of miles?
Dearmin: I can’t go into those details.
Jim: OK. If you can at a very high level, if you’re making the argument to a Congressional funder, and you are saying to him, here’s why this is better than a tank with traditional weapons in it, is there a quick elevator pitch as to the areas or the competitive advantage that this has that makes it better in some situations?
Dearmin: Virtual speed of light guiding, the delivery of electricity which require very little dwell time on targets, and because you are delivering electricity instead of light energy, it’s extremely efficient, and so it can have a compact basic source. The wall plug efficiency is much greater than any other high energy laser-type weapon.
Jim: You’ve mentioned mounted vehicles. Just for simplistic purposes I compare it to a tank. So I take a tank, I put a bomb into the tank turret. It blows up a target 500 yards away. And then this will be something different. This will be you point it at it and it will presumably have some advantages and some disadvantages.
Dearmin: As long as you have electrical energy, you have unlimited magazine, very deep magazines.
Jim: If it is self-contained, I guess I would have thought it would not be unlimited energy. …that carrying the power with you would become a limitation on how many shots you could fire.
Dearmin: As long as you have fuel, you’re cranking an alternator, and you’re charging up batteries and capacitors.
Jim: OK. What you’re saying is that the first shot energy is low enough that you are not using it all up in two or three shots. You have a fair amount.
Dearmin: We routinely operate in rep rates of many hertz.
Jim: Can then this be something at the end of the day would be potentially a replacement for a conventional tank or again is this at the end of the day a specialty application.
Dearmin: I think it has very, very broad, completely across the entire battlefield, and that is as far as I can go.
Mark Hood (? Capital): Good morning. I understand there’s been a lot of talk about confidentiality. Most of us out here don’t know much about your technology, and several people have asked for media place to go to learn more. Can you direct us to some academic source or something that will help us understand what you currently do?
Dearmin: Well, that’s one of the issues. What we do is fundamentally different, but a good guide for the whole basic area is, there’re many references to directed weapon energy weapons in the literature and there’s a lot of information available there. And then, but if you’ve taken what I’d mentioned in the call, you can kind of correlate the differences between what’re currently out there in the literature and what we are attempting to do.
Mark: When can we expect that you all be a little more revealing with what you do?
Dearmin: I don’t think that’s really up to us. I think that’s up to the United States government and they take this very seriously. We’re trying to balance the needs to share with our investors information and also the security of our country. It’s a difficult situation for use and I really do hope you’ll bear with us that. But certainly, we’ll have all the standard financial filings.
Question: When can we expect those?
Dearmin: Well, we’ll be filing I guess 10 days as per the rules as for a standard company.
Dearmin Closing Remarks: Well, in closing I want to thank all of you for coming and listening to our call. Some very, very good questions. Information will be more forthcoming but this is probably the most exciting thing that I know Bob and I have done. And we look forward to speaking with you again sometime soon. Thank you. |
