Lee, my feeling is that if you are looking for a short term trading stock look elsewhere and do us all a favour. If you are looking to buy and hold, my belief is that 1 year from now you will have been well-rewarded. I don't like to predict short term moves, there's obviously lots of volatility here and I can't say where the price is going day to day. I remain very bullish in the long term because this company has lots of irons in the fire, more than gets talked about here or that we even are aware of. The annual report will be out shortly and if the 1998 objectives are really aggressive, buy and watch out! Management has a superb history of meeting their published goals and most times has them pretty well in the bag beforehand. If we see an Asian auto partner signed, look for +$200 Cdn or +$140 US.
Watch for something from Daimler soon on the auto side.
With respect to stationary power, these guys know what they have to do to win business, I am confident of that. GPU and GEC Alsthom aren't in the business of wasting their time and money. I'm not an expert here so I don't have the expertise to credibly argue with anyone over the finer points of power generation. I will leave that up to Ballard/GPU and GEC, since they know who their customers are and what their needs are. I do know that they have never targeted competing with suppliers to the grid, they are focusing on off-grid markets and since they will ramp up production over time, they don't have to be all things to all people now or in the near future. It is a huge market and growing. I didn't write the EPRI article I posted, nor the 200 others in their archives that deal with the potential for fuel cells. I just read all the stuff I've posted here and much more. And I make my own decisions accordingly. If you look at the history of my postings you will see some of the best stuff I've found in there. There's lots of good reading from very credible sources.
I think that those who speculate that the major auto manufacturers are just placing a bet on a long shot ought to do more due diligence. The money being spent is not chump change. It's also important to have a global view here, while the big 3 US companies are playing catch-up on fuel cells, you will see that the real leadership comes from Europe and Asia, where you won't find 95 cent per gallon gasoline. I think if you calculated what the real costs are of that gas in both pollution and defending Kuwait, you might start looking for alternatives pretty quick.
FWIW |
