I copied the following piece from the AOL Motley Fool message boards. It was the cover letter sent to those who are on the company's fax list for news. It was part of Monday's release.
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Background on Spectrum's C6X Product Lind and it's Significance to the Company
Spectrum is a key player in the rapidly growing market for Digital Signal PRocessing (DSP) products. And the DSP industry had gained the attention of Wall Street due to the success of key players in the industry suchas Texas Instuments, whose stock has risen from US$85 in June to close at US$125 today.
Tom Engibous, Texas Instrument president and CEO, was recently quoted at a conference as saying, "We believe the market demand for DSP solutions will explose. TI thinks DSP solutions are important, so important that we've built our stratgetic direction around it". Will Strauss, president of research firm Forward Concepts, believes that the DSP chip market will grow from its current $3billion level to over $12 billion in 2001.
In it's early days, Spectrum was a general purpose DSP board provider. It licensed technology from third party vendors, combined it with its own propriety technology and offered it to the North American market. In 1993, Spectrum became the first DSP systems company to enter the Computer Telephony Integrations (CTI) market. The company received several awards for these products and the intelledctual property it acquired has been instrumental in cultivating additional business opportunties.
1997 represents yet another turning point in the company's history. TI's introduction of the C6x chip is the most significant development in the DSP industry since the introduction of the first programmable signal processors because of its extremely high performance. Spectrum's C6x products solutions announcement represents a new direction in the Company strategy. Spectrum's internally desinged C6x prodcuts will span all aspects of the business, including computer telelphony, military, aerospace, and commercial markets.
Spectrum has been developing it's C6x strategy since early 1997. The company's committment to this technology was reinforced in April 1997 when it hired Ron Wages, former DSP Marketing Manager for TI, as Spectrum's new Vice President of Marketing. His extensive knowledge of the technology and its implications in the industry was instrumental in launching this new direction.
The company has devoted more R&D dollars to the development of C6X products than any other initiative in the company's history. In addition to the board-level products, Spectrum's C6x product family includes proprietary technology such as DSP-software, custom chips and software tools which provide distinct competitive advantages to the company. Spectrum intends to target its C6x technology toward high margin applications in the digital radio, remote sensing and computer telephony server areas where it had already acheived promising results since Q4 1996 with revenues growing at 70% and
bottom line growth of 150%. The company believes this strategy will postion it as the world's leading C6x system provider in 1998 and beyond. |
