John, I'm just restating what Lev told us at the shareholders meeting. Essentially, our 'PO' announcement will be an after-the-fact matter. As you say, it's regrettable but understandable given the situation they were put in 4 years ago. Similarly, for any manufacturer looking to buy this new technology, there have been enough false starts to cause them to be wary as well. The episode of Matsushita with ULBI's first production attempt last year further underscores it. So I can see how the OEM will be very careful before they announce what they have for sale. We're starting to get more PR each month about products soon to be available. Eventually, one of those will be PR about a laptop, and there's only one company capable of making large lithium-polymer batteries. We own stock in it.
Whether the shipments occurred before or after the end of March is a tough call. Certainly we should see the increased expensing for the materials Lev told us they took possession of last January ('tens of metric tons of raw materials'), and for continued labor expenses. We may even finally get a rewrite of the status of the factory (essentially unchanged for 6 months now, according to outdated text left in the SEC documents...and we have been told of material events which supersede the words in the documents). Whether they started tapping Berg's loan in March is doubtful. I was suggesting it was occurring now, but that if they had no hope to do so, we'd have seen other financing terms already presented to us....which we haven't.
I would speculate that we'll hear other news before we see the last quarter's SEC filings, because those won't arrive until the end of June, since they're filed with the annual report. |
