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

To: Labrador who wrote (8701)	12/16/1999 10:56:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29987

<There probably won't even be a million handsets available until the second half of next year,> Well, it's nice to read a happily excited review, but he's not quite up with the play on expected sales. The idea of 1 million handsets being used has been deferred until 2001. Also, he seems to think the price will drop a great deal. There sure is scope for it, but no sign from the service providers that they have any intention of cutting price to generate a lot of minutes of use. Telit has handsets, but Ericsson is still to get theirs ready [sometime in February now assuming there isn't more plan variation to a later supply]. He also got the reason Iridium failed wrong. It wasn't so much that they didn't know that lower prices makes people more likely to buy. It was because the system was expensive to build and to be profitable, the minutes had to be expensive. Plus, the service providers paid about $3 a share, split-adjusted. Actually, nearer $2 than $3, so people paying $22 now are NOT getting it at the same price as the founders, though you could allow for some time value of their investment back in 1994 [5 years at 25% makes their original investment nearly $10 today]. Qualcomm and Loral didn't pay that much for their shares - I can't recall what it was, but their founding capital was small. Okay, there are some warrants and Loral and Bernard Schwartz have been buying at market prices lately, so they sure have paid even more than what the stock was available at today. He also said over 300,000 handsets have already been made. That's simply not true. Maybe there will be about 40,000 by the end of the year. More likely 30,000 since Telit seems to have only just started production. But 10,000 is neither here nor there when we are needing 100s of 1000s or handsets a month to get to the millions quickly. We need 6 million handsets in 3 or 4 years to be connected to make Globalstar really successful. He also seems unduly expectant on data services. Qualcomm designed the system to be upgraded at the gateway and the handset, but that isn't going to mean 384 kbps will be available on this constellation. It won't be. It's slow and will remain so. He also wanted to know one person who's made money on satellites - well, I have [paper profits anyway], though I suppose he meant businesses which have been profitable. He doesn't see how satellites have affected how he lives??!! Billions of minutes have been sold via geostationary services [much to everyone's dismay when they get a voice call sent that way]. Those minutes are economically valuable though they are upstream from the consumer, supporting businesses more than individuals. Also, TV via satellites has shrunk the world so that politics have taken on a global village effect. No longer are remote place so remote. Then there are the military satellites which have helped make the USA so powerful [though they still couldn't figure out where the Chinese Embassy was in Belgrade]. It seems he'll get rich for the wrong reasons...Globalstar is sure to be a big success; some time, though not next year. Profits will have to wait for the real next millennium starting in 2001. But it's nice to see some glimmerings of action. Maurice