Intereseting to say the least. I think this company is way undervalued. Look at the HIV test market. Business week reported it to be between 200-800 million in the U.S. alone. Wait till CMTR gets approval on their HIV tests. They will be the third and to my knowledge no one else has applied yet. The procesds takes a while so we shouldn't see any more competitors on the market for quite some time. I spoke with someon in management (Alene A. Holzman)-Vice President, and she reiterated that they expect approval in the end of the year or in the beginging of '97. In my opinion they hired this huge ad agency not to promote their cholestoral test ,which might or might not yield big dividends in the future, but to promote their HIV test when the time comes. Alene Holzman said that the one of the reasons the worked so hard on distributing the cholestoral test themselves is that now they have a large distribution channel to push the HIV tests through. In my opinion, this is a much larger product than any they have had before. I also questioned her on saliva testing which some of CMTR competitors are undergoing. She said they have performed some tests with saliva but at this time are not prepared to make any public statements about future endeavors because they feel that saliva tests will not be approved for U.S. use. Lastly I asked her about rapid tests for home use. Once again she said this is a possibility but not in the U.S. because the company feels the FDA will never, at least for the upcoming years, grant permission for rapid home HIV testing. This is a strong company in a good position. They have over 6 million cash on hand to help promote their HIV test once approved and that will be added to by incoming revenue of CholesTrak. Lastly, in my opinion the only reason that they took on five million worth of long-term debt was in anticipation of the HIV approval and they needed cash to promote the product, even though the stock would end up being dilluted. In my opinion, a dilluted stock with good profits is better than one with less shares but losing money.
Art,
A ChemTrakie |
