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

To: gdichaz who wrote (11146)	3/23/2000 9:41:00 PM
From: Drew Williams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29987

I hesitate to make any pronouncements about Ericsson's having any grand scheme to damage Globalstar in order to promote ACeS. Frankly, I do not think they could manage that kind of strategic thinking. (Witness how long it took them to cave on CDMA and how halfhearted their current efforts are in that area!) It does make me wonder, however, what the terms are of Ericsson's agreement with Globalstar to produce phones. I would think they would have to produce at least some minimum number of phones within some specified time frame in order to keep Bernie from calling up Nokia or Motorola and asking them to fill the GSM gap. Maybe Bernie's done that already? And maybe Irwin Jacobs has a Qualcomm GSM/CDMA Globalstar phone sitting on his desk waiting to be introduced at the right moment?

To: gdichaz who wrote (11146)	3/24/2000 1:03:00 PM
From: Dennis Roth	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 29987

gdichaz, blame Bernard Schwartz and the Globalstar management, not Ericsson. It was Globalstar management that decided to place a large part the fate of Globalstar in the hands of a handset maker whose interests clearly lie elsewhere. Ericcsson's contracts to provide handsets for ACeS and ICO are no secret. Bernie was fully aware of the terms of Ericssons ACeS contract to be the exclusive provider of 275,000 phones using Ericssons' GMSS technology and where Ericsson has the incentive to make the phones fast and cheap because they get $0.01 a minute after the first 200 million minutes are sold. Blame Bernie for putting all the incentives to sell minutes on the SP's and none on the handset makers. They have no incentive to make the handsets cheap and in a timely manner because they don't care how quickly minutes used ramps up ( except Qualcomm ). Why would anyone expect Ericsson to bust their hump trying to get the R290 out? A phone where they have to buy chips from Qualcomm, pay Qualcomm a percentage of ASP as a royalty and which could steal some of those $0.01 minutes they could get from ACeS. It is interesting to note that Ericsson is planing to make a trimode GSM 900/1900 and GMSS phone for the North American market, an area for which there is no GMSS service... *YET!* Its clear their heart lies with GMSS not CDMA for satellite service. Blame Bernie for being foolish enough to believe that Ericsson would work against their own interests to rush a CDMA sat phone out. Blame Bernie for accepting a lame excuse of "but we haven't got type approval." For an experianced international phone maker like Ericcsson to take months getting type approval is as lame as the "dog ate my homework" excuse. Given their incentives there will be no shortage of R190's when the ACeS soft roll out starts in June. I wonder if the R290 will have type approval by then? By the time Ericsson gets R290's into the hands of their Asian dealers they will have R190's to compare them to. The purchase price of the 190 will be lower, the phone will be smaller and lighter, and the satellite service will be cheaper. Don't blame Ericsson for acting in what they see as their own best interest.