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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Maurice Winn who wrote (5145)6/10/1999 6:32:00 AM
From: Thomas  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 29987
 
Hi Maurice,
Any idea as to orders of magnitude of operating costs for I*? I can't imagine that they are all that significant. Perhaps the more crucial issue is just how much of the value of the enterprise gets flushed in the restructuring. Assuming that MOT doesn't want to make good on their guarantees, I would think that all equity and most sub debt gets wiped. Assuming the senior lenders & MOT end up owning most of the show, how much debt can this puppy support?

Cross post from LOR:

As for the Austin Powers angle, Groooovy baybee! I am totally hip to that idea. Agree marketing is job one point five (one point oh being getting the birds up there, obviously, keep up the good work, Dr. A), and perhaps we are all a bit too smug in our confidence that G* has picked the right business model where the service providers (leaders in their various markets more or less) do the selling and have every economic incentive to do so, both as investors and beneficiaries of healthy margins.

So, I agree with you that we could all smell the coffee again this morning and start doing some table pounding on this marketing question and perhaps even on MW's famous p****g question.

On the pricing question, I have often wondered how much real control G* would have over the end price charged by its SPs (I am not aware of any contractual control). I guess, as shareholders, the SPs should have the right incentive to maximize the # of minutes sold, but I do worry that SPs might get greedy and say "hey, this phone is so cool and everyone wants one, we can get away with charging $4.50 a minute!, so let's milk this baby." Then G* would get short changed on the deal.

I sincerely hope that we are all correctly placing our trust in G* management that they truly have learned from the disastrous I* mistakes in execution, but the concerns voiced in this forum on the handset availability issue give me some pause, I must admit.

Cheers,
Thomas




To: Maurice Winn who wrote (5145)6/10/1999 10:04:00 AM
From: JP  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 29987
 
I sold my ICO stock and will only buy it back if GSTRF is (very) successful. I think ICO will watch GSTRF carefully to determine if there really is the market we are all hoping for.

JP



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (5145)6/15/1999 11:02:00 AM
From: Rajala  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 29987
 
>*Iridium* Ira, sure, Iridium will continue and sell their minutes and I've explained that
> before. But they have only about 1.2bn minutes to sell. Globalstar has 12bn minutes
> to sell.

*Qualcomm* Mqurice, sure, Nevada has much more land to sell than Maine. From this we can conclude, well, what can we conclude from this?

>Forget about Iridium, it's now of academic interest only.

Even supposing its over and out for I* after five years, which is quite possible, it is certainly not of academic interest if you are an investor in an another multibillion USD satellite co which is supposed to get some dough back within the next five years.

Is I* going to give up without a fight? Hell, no. They are filling the minutes like an airline is filling the seats, like they say themselves.

However, it's a mystery to me how do they fill these bad quality seats when there is usually a much better alternative available, a terrestial system.

Imagine the scenario: you are in a restaurant in need of a call. You have to pull out an ping-pong pad sized satellite phone and answer the numerous questions from your friends how much you got ripped off. If that wasn't humiliating enough THEN you have to go outside, point the antenna wherever you think the satellite is, walk a block if there are too tall buildings in front of you and hope that just at that moment you are not exactly in the time gap of the satellite coverage.

Meanwhile your pals are having good time taking the mickey out of you, your girlfriend laughs just a little too eagerly to your best friend's jokes and everybody is putting used serviettes in your leather briefcase you always carry for the phone and left behind in anticipation of getting mugged.

So these are the minutes I* thinks of selling like aeroplane seats.

- rajala