Yesterday, 6/15/98, I called Mark Thomas with a couple of questions
about the press release and had a real interesting talk. ADTC is writing their own press releases and CTC distributes them. In a nutshell, the information regarding revenues and earnings is the SAME as we heard at the annual meeting, but it hadn't been published until yesterday. There is no new "bad news", just a re-statement of what we knew a month ago.
Mark also said that Bill at CTC was out of line for even mentioning an earnings estimate. ADTC had purposefully said that
no estimate was being given because they can't accurately predict
what their net is going to be. The capacitor business is apparently
going so well that they really have a tiger by the tail. Production is
the limiting factor, and Mark said that consolidated revenues (ADTC + 65% of DNA) will be "over $25 million" for 1998. I told him that I think they need to do a better job of letting the world know that the business is going great.
I'm leaving in a few hours for Nova Scotia, but I wanted to leave one
more thought behind. I've been trying to put a value on the patents
that ADTC is accumulating. If all the 21 pending patents are granted,
they will own about 30 outright. So far, it looks like the older ones have already been worth about $3 million to the company in royalties and fees, so an estimate of $15 million is probably quite conservative. This is about $4.00 per share, or twice the current market price. Let's
hope that value investing comes back in style soon.
Tom |
