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

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (8147)	11/2/1999 11:43:00 AM
From: Rocket Scientist	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29987

A couple of thoughts on phone production rates: G* bears (and even some of our favorite bulls like MQ) believe that slow ramp up in production signifies some lack of confidence in someone (not clear exactly who: G, the SPs, the manufacturers?) that there is a market for G. I suppose that's possible, but even if there were absolute confidence by everybody in G* market, the phone production rate wouldn't/shouldn't be much faster/earlier, imo. Why? Because we live in a just in time world. If G* phones were fully productized commodities, and all we needed to make a sale was arrival of a delivery truck, a modern mnfctr would time his production to be very close to the truck's scheduled arrival. Now suppose any number of random events could delay the truck schedule by months...wouldn't a prudent mnfctr wait until most/all of those random risks were retired and he could be reasonably certain of the truck's arrival time? Substitute "G* space segment" for "truck" and you have the situation faced by G* et. al. until very recently. Now consider that the phones are not (yet) fully productized commodities...they're complex little devices with several new interfaces to users and spacecraft that won't be fully debugged without extensive beta testing. Would it be wise to stockpile a huge number of these things, not knowing the extent of rework/scrap you might encounter as a result of the beta testing? If people are upset because they feel BLS implied or promised a faster ramp up than we're actually seeing, I guess that's understandable. But to jump to the conclusion that the slowness is a result of lack of confidence in the market, is wrong, IMHO.

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (8147)	11/2/1999 3:50:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

Jeff, a quarter is not huge in the 10 year plan, but why waste a quarter. It means a quarter delay in getting to a full constellation and a quarter delay in maximum profits. That is serious money. We have 10bn minutes a year going to waste right now. That is $10bn in value to subscribers going down the drain right now. That is $1bn a month. That is real money to most people. Qualcomm should absolutely keep the Globalstar handset business. They have NO cdmaOne competitors unlike in the terrestrial market, so they can clean up. Don't forget the technology trend - terrestrial is going to go cdma2000 or W-CDMA in 3 years so that means Qualcomm will get an increasing share of the business. Ericsson will be stuck with the legacy GSM networks and single mode Globalstar phones. Same for Telit. When there are 20m Globalstar phones in use, being replaced every 3 years, Qualcomm will be making a very, very large amount of money as sole supplier of cdma2000/cdmaOne/W-CDMA/Globalstar handsets. They haven't licensed anyone else for QCDMA in space! Well, I don't think so anyway. Don't forget, when Orbitel [NOT Ericy, who denied at the time that QCDMA would even work on earth let alone in space] signed a licence for Globalstar handsets, GSM ruled the terrestrial digital world and seemed set to take over completely. So it would have been of little concern or interest to Orbitel or Telit to think about the weird new standard QCDMA which was starting to appear from San Diego for terrestrial networks. Qualcomm will do EXTREMELY well from Globalstar. Maurice