Re: VLNC. I'm from the VLNC thread, and can answer a few of your questions.
They have nearly 400 patents issued or pending.
Technically the stock is hard to draw a bead on right now, because most of the volume has dried up, with most investors anticipating shipping under purchase orders to occur within a month or so. MM manipulation may result in some buying opportunities below 7, but not likely; currently there is one MM selling, and it's getting absorbed by the others (acc. to level II quotes). Volume is too low to give meaningful signals for now.
Status: They are way beyond the transition from R+D to production. Their facility in Northern Ireland is nearly complete, with their own in-house chemical mixing (wet and dry), lamination equipment (they control patents on manganese-oxide related laminates, much safer than the cobalt-based laminates most of their competitors are being forced to use), and four assembly lines running in parallel. High-speed runs have been taking place since last fall on the first line (laptop cells), iteratively tuning/debugging the equipment at progressively higher speeds. They have sent production run samples out to the repackagers over two months ago for the first line, and a month ago from the second (cellphone) line. The third line is in debug mode, and is adjustable on the fly for different cell sizes. BTW, cell sizes refer to surface dimensions; all lines can stack a variable number of fundamental 'bicells' (about 1.1mm thick) into a 'cell' (always 3.8v), depending upon the desired configuration. E.g., the cellphone cells are made in sizes from 4 to 9 'bicells' thick, usually; the laptop cells in stacks of 4 to 6 bicells. Of course, laptop applications require three of the laptop cells in series, but they can be configured in different ways in the final product (flat side-by-side configuration most likely).
The process engineer hiring that you're looking for already took place early last fall. If you look back through the SI threads, you'll see links to the Belfast Telegraph. They're a lot further along than anyone except their own shareholders expect, and will likely produce li-poly cells in greater volume than and sooner than any of their competitors. They just hired a COO to direct operations.
Expect all four lines operational under contracts by fall, some before summer. This is fact, not speculation. All the equipment is in place, there's no remaining engineering questions; the next problems will be operational in nature, in getting the entire sequencing of processes to operate in a 'balanced' fashion, as there are over a dozen steps involved to get from raw materials to final product. But this is all automated and running already. The most likely potential production bottlenecks exist at the back end, regarding the charging and quarantining of the cells off the line. But these are low-tech, and solution involves just expanding to handle greater volume.
Further, they will be the only ones able to produce large enough cells to power laptops, because such cells cannot safely be made of the cobalt materials.
Their recent PR regarding the patent on the phosphate materials should not be underestimated. They never issued PR for their previous 250 issued patents. They anticipate licensing royalties even from the liquid lithium-ion battery makers, who cannot directly compete with them due to their limited form factors.
The financing is not really an issue, because they are purposely delaying a secondary offering until the street sees they have contracts they've shipped under (will not 'preannounce' contracts for product the OEM hasn't accepted and paid for). If it was, they wouldn't have spent down the cash they raised, to put in four assembly lines all at once. Their largest shareholder (Carl Berg) has very deep pockets ($800M), and will extend more credit as needed, as last resort. The CEO is the second largest shareholder, so he's trying to delay going to Carl Berg unless he has to, preferring to avoid dilution that would result from issuing more stock at current prices.
BTW, Wolanchuk (quoted on Stocksmart) was way too early hyping the stock, and the delays from a year ago in getting the production process ironed out (had to go back to making laminates in-house, and design new production equipment with a different supplier) have led the street to consider any words relating to production as 'crying wolf.' Hence the company has stopped making them, and are likely going to blind-side the marketplace by summertime. IMHO. FWIW.
Hope this helps. Just a heads-up. Do your own DD.
Disclaimer: long valence, following very closely for two years, distantly for longer. |
