Just subscribed to the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, Barrons and MoneyInsider (all for $29.95/year!) and found the following article that was in the August 18, 1997 Barrons print edition. It's our 'ol friend Marty Cohen, touting VLNC (and to a lesser extent, ULBI). It reaffirmed my belief in VLNC as a 2 - 4 year holding.
ASSAULT ON BATTERIES:
Lithium Ion Could Light Up
Your Portfolio -- Long-Term
Forget the damn bunny: With the technologies now being developed, his
drumsticks could be batteries. Or his dark glasses. Or even his ears.
The portability of electronic products took a big leap with lithium ion
batteries, which weigh half as much as their nickel-cadmium predecessors,
take up half as much space, have longer lifespans and recharge
significantly faster. Lithium ion batteries now are ubiquitous in laptops,
cellular phones and power tools -- but with every advance in battery
power, product engineers find new energy-sucking applications to drain
them.
The next quantum jump in batteries, contends small-cap hedge fund
manager Morton Cohen, is a solid (rather than liquid) version of the lithium
ion technology. Lighter and longer-lived than liquid-core batteries, the
solid polymer variant is cheaper and easier to make. As significantly, it can
be stretched, pulled and bent into countless shapes -- and that, says
Cohen, opens up all kinds of design possibilities.
As with any frontier technology, the companies developing the new
batteries are small, vulnerable and prone to disappointments. But Cohen
maintains that two -- Valence Technology and Ultralife Batteries -- are
especially promising: Both have strong balance sheets, expect to start
production later this year and in his view are significantly undervalued, not
least because analysts don't follow them. Yet, as Cohen also points out,
these aren't illiquid investments. In fact, with Valence trading more than
200,000 shares a day, Cohen suspects some institutional buyers may be
moving in.
"I think you're looking at a huge home run here," he concludes. "These
aren't stocks you buy to make a couple of points -- these are stocks you
buy to be at the leading edge of a new technology." And, it should go
without saying, companies you can expect to own for two to three years
"before they make real money" -- which means they're not for rabbits. |
