To: P2V who wrote (1307 ) 11/30/1999 11:00:00 PM From: axial Respond to of 16863
Mardy - Boy, we're sure getting some excellent posts. I haven't had time to properly research the reception/antenna issues raised by the VOFDM question, so your insight is greatly appreciated. As we approach the meeting, I am pleasantly surprised to see that Wi-LAN's price, and investors, have held up well. The speculative excess has been bled from the stock price, and it's holding its ground. More important, the tone of the investors: confident. Just a small addition to the wonderful comments made by others: A while ago, I posted my first attempt to run some numbers on Wi-LAN: difficult to do, because we don't know the terms of any of Wi-LAN's deals. I've revised it slightly, but I'm doing it again, because I think the importance of this weekend's meeting obscures this fact: Regardless of the outcome of this meeting, Wi-LAN will be an immensely profitable company. ____________________________________________________________ The members of the HAVi consortium presently include Philips, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Thomson Multimedia, Hitachi, Grundig and Toshiba. Worldwide sales total in the tens of billions of dollars. HAVi will enable the effortless interaction of home audio-visual devices, including computers, with a data transfer rate consistent with the IEEE 1394 standard. No wires, beyond the power plug. It "future proofs" all equipment embracing the standard, which will come out in the 1.0 version January/2000. Suppose this is fiscal 2001-2002, and each of these companies has been selling HAVi devices for a year. Suppose each has sold 2 million devices, world-wide, in that time (a safe, low estimate). Each of these devices will incorporate a Wi-LAN transceiver; let's say Wi-LAN gets, net, $10 for each transceiver - another safe, low estimate. That's 8 companies x 2M devices = 16 million devices. That's 16M devices x $10 = $160 million, net, to revenue. Assume, by then, that Wi-LAN has 50 million shares. That works out to $3.20 EPS based just on HAVi, and ignoring any other wireless revenue. With a P/E of 20, that gives a $64 share price, based just on first year HAVi sales, ignoring all other revenue. Revenue from HAVi will increase quickly in the following years, as it becomes the de facto home wireless A/V standard. Unit costs for transceivers will drop, but volume will rapidly increase. If you add in revenue from other known streams, you should be looking at $5+ EPS in f2001 - 2002. This guesstimate is conjecture - but it's a very safe set of numbers. So, regardless of the outcome of this weekend, can anyone see why Wi-LAN will not be $200/shr. in 3-4 years? FWIW, Jim