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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry Brubaker who wrote (16093)	11/15/1999 3:08:00 AM
From: Rich Wolf	Respond to of 27311

Yes, Larry, they could have. At least, if they'd chosen to hand-package the laptop cells. As has become clear, the laptop market has been much slower to develop. Issues of second sourcing are significant, especially for customers who are committing to design-ins for which there would be no alternative battery. Hence, we had all thought, and were led to believe, that OEMs would be interested in drive-bay drop-ins. We were told at the shareholders meeting back in February to expect as a first product release a laptop drive-bay battery application. However, in retrospect that proved not to be the case, for a variety of reasons (price undercutting by li-ion cell makers, temporary oversupply due to overbuilt capacity of li-ion manufacturing, etc.). So as I had been suspecting would be the case, the initial product releases are instead for cellphone cells, since there are many other similar-sized products that could be substituted and hence there is less risk on the OEM's part. Nevertheless, the company has benefited during the interim, improving their techniques and expanding their capacity, likely in ways we'll never know. The extended experience in manufacturing and testing over the last year has probably presented them with a plethora of production-related issues which they've since addressed and resolved, issues that will be proven to have been better to have ironed out before actually being in the process of commercial production on a tight timeline.