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Technology Stocks : Opticom ASA (OPC - Norway) Data Storage of the future!? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GNMartin who wrote (70)	1/15/2000 7:01:00 AM
From: Jimmie Landerman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 84

I currently received an analysis of Opticom from a norwegian stockbroker/investment banker called Sundal Collier & Co. Its 20 pages long and they give Opticom a buy rating at the price Opticom 1080 NOK, (around 1.6 billion USD). The discussion they use is as follows: "If we assume that Opticom can bring only 2% of the storage market, or USDb 5 to its P&L, it is probably not discounted more than some 2-3% probability of success in the current share price (assuming NOK 350 per share is Fast value). Just by lifting the probability of success to 10% means the share price should soar three-fold. There is no doubt that the recent deal with Intel implies a significant risk reduction. Intel has carried out a due diligence process with Opticom for nearly a year, and if it regarded the probability of success to be below 5%, we do not believe it would commit itself to spend 18 months of research with Opticom ." (Todays share price is around 1650 NOK for Opticom) Of course, for a company like Opticom it's possible to get any target price with some small different presumes. It's more the psychology in the market at the moment that sets the price on companies like this. But, fact remains, large analysis like this, gives a lot of new attention to the company. And the psychology in the market have never been more positive than it is today in valuing companies with possible large revenues some years into the future. I think Sundal Collier, maybe overestimate the value for Opticom of 2 percent of the storagemarket of today, but greatly underestimate the possibility to take much more than that, and the possibility for Opticom to revolutionize the storage market as a whole. And maybe even revolutionize the whole silicon industry, and with intel as a partner they will have a good chance to succeed if they can prove that the technology work for mass production. Yes, this is just a complicated way to say that I still feel confident to be lpng in this paper, and the last weeks extreme volatility in the share price (between 800 - 1800 NOK), hopefully means that some of the nervous investors with big profits is now out of papers when they saw the price fall, and tried to save what could be saved. Yet another analysis was released this week from the very well regarded firm Alfred Berg. I have not seen it myself but heard that it was very positive to both FAST and Opticom. They say that FAST is substantially lower priced than similar firms (in the US), (at a price of 500 NOK per FAST share). Opticom they think as an investment with a larger risk. But still gives a buy rating at 1500 NOK per Opticom share. (my comment is that of course Opticom is a more risky investment, but the potential is gigantic, and that is what I want to be a part of. again don't invest money you cant loose In the analysis from Sundal Collier & Co, they rank what they believe is Opticoms biggest competitors. They name Holographic memory system IBM is one of the parties involved in this project. A commercial system will be physically very large and would be used in high-end work stations and servers rather than personal computers. This technology is also many years from commercialization. The project management has stated that a product could be on the market by year 2003, but other experts believe it is at least 10 years before market launch is realistic. terastor.com TeraStor's New Field Recording, is supported by major corporations like Quantum (leading within data storage on disks) and 3M participate. This concept is based on magnetic recording material used for storage. Laser is used to read/write, but a modified version of the flying read/write head, which includes optical elements and magnetic coil, makes it faster and cheaper than conventional CD systems. Experts in the storage market state that the company has some problems with stability of the product in the production. This technology has taken longer to commercialize than expected and it is regarded as unlikely it will ever be a big success. The Protein Memory System, . This is a non-commercial project, and it is far from any market launch. The person behind the research on this technology is Robert Birge, who also sits on the technology advisory board at Opticom. The reason why Opticom approached Birge was to benefit from his work on this protein, which is used in the memory film in Opticom's product. Birge has expressed his enthusiasm for Opticom's technology, and he says that Opticom is much closer to a commercial product than is his Protein Memory System Orom - developed by a company Ioptics is a similar technology to Opticom's first generation lens-based polymer system. Opticom abandoned this concept 3 years ago. c-3d.net C-3D has a new technology, which is based on polymers. It claims it should be able to manufacture a 20 layer ROM card with 10 GB capacity by end of year 2000. C-3D's main problem is that it uses laser beams to read and write the data. This implies that new hardware is required to make this work, which implies a significant barrier to commercialization, as the consumer needs to change behavior. Reveo is also working with polymers as a material. The technology seems to be more complicated than Opticom's as it involves light beams focused through lenses, which is a concept that Opticom has abandoned. Reveo's technology also has some challenges in that the liquid has to be contained, a disadvantage with respect to thickness, and it is also a question if it is possible to produce on a reel-to-reel basis. Sundal Colliers conclusion is that " C-3D and Revoe have the most realistic technologies, but their capacities are inferior to Opticom's and at least C-3D has the disadvantage of requiring new hardware, which increases the costs and creates barriers to launching the product in the market." I'm going to take a further look at these technologies and see if I find anything really exciting.