Now that we have gotten part of the anger and disappointment of the Shareholders meeting out of the way, lets try and bring out any positive's that might help calm the nerves of the people that still own this stock. Lets try and start from scratch. Lets try and look forward.
One very encouraging item that I heard from the meeting deals with the new ISP service. Below is part of Tom O'Mara's speech at the shareholders meeting referring to the new ISP service for the Dallas area:
"The response in the last.... week for radio and three days for the billboards, has been incredible and overwhelming .....and our subscriber base has been well above projections. So we were quite impressed......as Pat says it was just a simple technology that we just added without any hardware that just continually builds the revenue stream for Curtis Mathes."
They need as many sources of revenue as possible to keep this company afloat. I am totally surprised that it appears that the setup fee is not hindering people to sign up. Either they are not balking at paying the setup fee, or more customers are signing up for the pre-paid annual plans that waive this fee. The main objective in selling the uniViews in the first place was to get people to use the Xpressway, that generates a monthly fee. Whether it is by the uniView or this new ISP service, what makes the difference!! Granted, the ISP service will not generate additional income from advertisement and such, like the uniView is suppose to do, but just how much more money are they talking about. Maybe an additional 1-3%? Not much, when you consider that the cost of selling the ISP service to the general public is a lot less that trying to sell the uniView to potential customers. Who knows, maybe in the distance future, the revenue from the ISP might be more than the uniView user monthly fee. It certainly will not come from the box itself. If I understood Custer correctly, he gave a $6-$8 profit figure for the box. At least they do have additional money coming into the coffers with this ISP, without having to rely on just getting the uniView to market.
I do not expect the sales at the retail level to be much of an impact right now. Especially after hearing about BrandsMart and the lack of sales at Fry's. I hope if need be, they can explore other avenues in getting the uniViews into the hands of the buying public efficiently. They do not have the big bucks like MSFT, nor the marketing clout like Sony to pour a fistful of money into an area, that so far has been a hard nut to crack at the retail store level for all companies. I would not be surprised if the first reports from the sale at Communication Expo and Fry's is the reason why this company has taken a back seat to pushing the uniView at the store level as much as we would like. Getting each store up and running, costs a lot of investment dollars. If they are finding cheaper ways in accomplishing this tasks, then it would be better in the short term because of the cash shortages.
That brings me to the PFS deal. There might be something more to this than just a simple deal. This company might be looking for a large partner or buyer of the company. Why would Custer need a company to bring in cash only? He might need outside expertise to bring a much bigger deal together, than he can handle himself. Maybe he is tired, and just once out. Now would be the time to start looking for these types of big deals. |
