>>Think I'll stay awhile.<<
I think that is wise. It is important to remember that ASI's target market (for now!) is the Fortune 1,000 companies. These are the big companies with huge sales bases. ASI now has two products that it is offering to their customers. T&A, and Middleware (data capture and collection). To understand just how big this market is, I found another article that provides us with some idea of just how much room ASI has to expand their customer base. So, hx4, here's another reason why you might want to hold on for awhile . . .
Automatic I.D. News May 1998 issue - article on Industry Challenge: provide cost effective solution for 1.5 million firms.
In this article they quote a study by Dun & Bradstreet study.
This study shows . . .
There are 8,200 companies with sales between $250 million and $2 billion who are now being targeted by Automatic Data Collection companies.
Remember that ASI is just really getting started in this area, and it now has somewhere between 20 to 30 of these large companies as clients! The upside potential is enormous. If you recall what the President of this company said in his earlier interview - one of their customers has 160 plants, and ASI has only installed their product in 17 of these. The potential roll out to the other plants, combined with the addition of new large multi-plant customers will provide a potential install base that is staggering!
If ASI decided that they wanted to provide a solution for some of the smaller operations, then here is some more stats that show just how big this market is. By the way, scaling a product down is a heck of a lot easier than scaling a product up. In my opinion, ASI could make their products available to these next two groups in a heartbeat.
There are 133,252 companies between the $10 million and $250 million sales range. These companies are being targeted by direct and VAR companies.
There are 1.5 million firms who have sales between the $1/2 million and $10 million sales range. These companies are largely not being served at all by the data collection industry.
The article also includes this notation . . .
"That means investing in solutions and results, not equipment. The biggest cost in any manufacturing operation is time. The whole point of using data collection is to capture information quicker and compress time throughout the entire business process."
Once again, this is another reason why ASI is so well positioned for the future. They have the ability to allow their customers to use their existing data collection hardware, which allows them to focus on the software.
If you haven't already guessed, I like ASI's position in the market, and I believe that this company, and our investment in it, will grow strongly over the coming years.
Crazy Canuk |
