1) I am struggling with the unnecessary personal tone of your responses to my posts. First, you "accuse" me of not liking Cymer because it is a one-product outfit. This is ridiculous, and I don't know where you came up with it. But if it was true, so what? It has not one whit of relevance to UTEK's investment value. It's just an illogical ad hominem argument. You point out that Mr. Z (and yourself, to a lesser degree) knows much more than I do about both the application of, and the potential market for, P-GILD. By the same token, however, I am an honest and experienced investor and unlike Mr. Z (and you, to a lesser degree), I have no prejudice for or against UTEK. However much I might be right or wrong, my motives are not suspect.
People who want investment boards to be ruled by a veneer of consensus, enforced by personal flames on non-conforming posters, do not grasp that conflicting ideas are these boards' greatest strength. This tends to turn investment boards into one-way pep rallies. I always want to hear any concerns or negative perceptions about stocks I buy or recommend.
And if I say something wrong, or poorly reasoned, I expect to be corrected. But I don't expect personal attacks in reply to honestly held concerns. And I especially don't expect to get good-natured humorous comments thrown back in my face. (And by the way, I did NOT say I'd had too much to drink and it wasn't on the CYMI board.) I say my share of stupid things, but my reputation for integrity and my proven investment record should afford me at least some courtesy.
2) If Ultrabeam is, as you say, intended to provide mask writers for UTEK's i-beam steppers, it is indeed a well-integrated purchase, with good horzontal overlap. But my concern over a cash-rich company losing focus by diversification is valid. I might be wrong, but the concern is legitimate. I've seen a lot of companies "diworsefy", as Peter Lynch calls it, by buying ongoing operations in areas that seem close to the core business but don't gel with it, causing a loss of managerial focus. There are certainly large companies with broad general coverage in a field, but Ultratech is not one. Comparing little UTEK to AMAT is like comparing Cymer to Coherent, or the Gap to Wal-Mart.
On top of that, there have been persistent statements over the past year that UTEK is engaging in EUV research/development. That also worries me, in light of the company's limited resources and their simultaneous expansions into masking and laser doping. I worry that their resources are being thinly spread between keeping the stepper operation on the cutting edge (against formidable and much larger opposition), expanding horizontally into masking, and pursuing a rather revolutionary, market-encompassing doping operation. Any intelligent investor would have misgivings about their ability to do all three. This question, in my mind, still needs to be answered.
3) I have not seen a single P-GILD sale reported, even for test or research purposes. So what if I'm confused about P-GILD? So is everyone else. Brinker called it a thermal annealing process (which is apparently a secondary application but not where the major market is expected to appear). You yourself misstated the hypothetical market potential by a factor of 10 to 20x. Even the steadfast THC changed his report on whether P-GILD was even promoted in UTEK's Sematech booth.
Damn right I'm skeptical. This is a very hypothetical product with a potentially tremendous but totally unproven market, a "story stock". I've heard $100MM and I've heard $2BB. But I've never seen even a suppositional analysis of the numbers. And again, no matter how brilliant, knowledgeable, and honest Mr. Z may be, I HAVE heard CEO's get a little overenthusiastic about unproven products once or twice in my life.
For every Iomega, there are two Corfams. Somebody needs to point out that there's many a slip twixt a workable laser-doping machine and two billion dollars.
4) For an old fart, I keep up with the technology pretty well. I will say, as an admonition to you, that I have corrected some hundreds of patently misperceived posts -- even dealing with the technical aspects of wafer photolith -- in various investment forums, and I have never yet made a rude personal attack on a poster for what I considered an erroneous statement. If you are very enthusiastic about a stock, as you appear to be about UTEK, you would be well-served to consider the possible merits of negative posts. I certainly listen to your messages, and appreciate both the time and intelligence that goes into them.
And on that note, I will say (in illustration of my chest-pounding maturity) that I renewed a nice acquaintance with UTEK this morning, largely on the strength of Carl Johnson's recomendation, together with a number of people on this board (including yourself). And I'm happy to say I'm up a couple of bucks. But anyone who buys this stock without realizing that it could lose beaucoup francs is dwelling in Fantasy-land.
I like story stocks and I like one-product companies. I'm long at least 1,000 shares of Ramtron, PeakSoft, WAND (actually only 800 shares, I sold some today), BLUD, maybe a couple of others more problematical than Ultratech, and none of them with UTEK's safety-net of cash flow. But I appreciate the risks and am not about to bury my head in the sand because a respected CEO says its going to do $2 billion in a few years. You need to wake up and see the possible downside here, but even if you don't, you certainly owe me a least some civility in responding to my concerns, no matter how misguided you think they may be. |
