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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yan Li who wrote (18413)	2/22/2000 9:23:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

I share your interest in the fuel cell area. I'm not so sure it is too early to see the gorillas. You can say that there are three major areas where fuel cells will be used: Home, Car and micro. Home fuel cells: PLUG has a commanding lead here. The reason is that they have teamed up with GE. GE is doing the sales and distribution for PLUG (and they take most of the profit). GE is field testing home units this year and will start selling units to the public at the end of this year or early next year. It is a appliance about the size of a refrigerator. Plug it in and cut off your utility connection. GE is very serious about the project, they have a product line, a web site and distributors already announced. Can you name me anybody anywhere that is going to be able to compete with GE in selling home fuel cells to run your home? You can challenge them by questioning how much they will cost and how many sales are possible but I doubt GE is so stupid that they haven't considered this. Car: BLDP is not the only player but they sure have got the contracts. There was a recent announcement in Germany from Mercedes (ok, Daimler-Chrysler) about how their subdivision (which is a partnership with BLDP) will have cars on the market no later than 2004. BLDP has just started construction on a factory that will put out hundreds of thousands of batteries per year by 2004. It would be interesting to investigate how much of the market they have. A lot of this is tied up in who owns what rights. Lawyers are having a field day. I think either Honda or Tyota has a fuel cell car available now. I saw a ad for it. Something like 50 to 70 miles per gallon. I'm not sure whose fuel cell. Do you know? micro fuel cells: MHTX and DCHT are the only two advanced players I know in this market. Motorola is doing some research. A institute in Germany is a third player. I expect to see MHTX or DCHT to team up sometime soon with a major player just like PLUG found GE. Otherwise you are roadkill. MHTX seems to have a lot of patents but so does DCHT. Franz