.... Message 4 ....
[Now Harmon began speaking]
* Sales of Rambus based ICs to date (3 years) = $1.25B. This is the market value, not the royalties (I hope I really didn't have to say that <g>)
* [It was interesting to see the 1997/1998 revenue and earnings charts. If you look at the 1998 numbers, you see that CY98 was actually a flat year. But the stock price doubled. There was definitely a lot of anticipation in the stock price.]
* As of the end of Q199 there is $28M in deferred revenue that will be recognized this year. There is another $63M beyond that to be recognized. They have no idea what they're going to do with the cash (that they would tell us)
* The lawyers have cautioned them about their forward-looking public statements
* They have a small investment in ISI plus a few other companies. All totaled, their investments are in the $1M to $2M range.
* In PCs, DRAM royalty will be much larger than the logic chip royalties. In smaller systems (e.g. Nintendos) more of the royalty comes from the logic chips. In the Nintendo, royalties from logic chips might even be double the DRAM chip royalties.
* Re: the warrants. In addition to the 1M shares that Intel has, they have granted (or authorized, not sure which) an additional 400K shares for other partners. These warrants will be available for purchase (at $10/share) once Intel ships at least 20% of their systems with Rambus support for 2 quarters in a row. The quarter that that happens there will be a HUGE one-time charge against earnings. For example, if the stock price is $100 per share when this happen, and if all partners exercised their warrants, there would be a one time charge of (100-10)*1,400,000 = $126M against earnings. Get ready. In addition, there will be an additional dilution of 5% of the stock pool.
* FERam is aimed at EPROM applications and focuses on the internal structure of the EPROM. Conceivably, FERam solutions could also include a Rambus interface to speed the data transfer rate.
That's it. I'm sure I missed a bunch that the others will add to. I'm going to go soak my fingers now.
Have a great weekend!
Dave B
p.s. You too, Jeff |
