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Biotech / Medical : GUMM - Eliminate the Common Cold -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Marcellus who wrote (2741)	10/23/2000 9:22:36 AM
From: DanZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5582

<a lot of investor money has been flushed down the toilet on marketing failures> Some of Gum Tech's past products were marketing failures, particularly one to two years after they went public. Some of their more recent products have stagnating growth because the distributors aren't putting any effort into marketing them. What company doesn't have marketing failures? The most important thing is that it takes time for a company to establish their reputation in the marketplace. They can't go from being a privately held company that makes a single energy gum for runners to signing a substantial joint venture with a company the size of Swedish Match overnight. Several iterations led up to this, and yes, it took time and they had to borrow money and issue stock along the way. From that perspective, I disagree that Gum Tech has thrown money down the toilet because they used the capital to build a reputation that led to their owning 49% of a new company with Swedish Match. Swedish Match contributed $10 million in start up capital and Gum Tech contributed intellectual property related to nicotine chewing gum products. In short, they went from privately held with one product; to publicly held; to we are going to build our own brand names; to we are going to grow by selling our gum making expertise to companies that can better market our products; to we signed a substantial joint venture with Swedish Match and are in final talks with a large consumer products company to bring a well established branded dental gum to market. The latter was made possible only because Gum Tech established themselves as experts in the formulation of functional chewing gum by making the products that you call failures. <That is the argument you should have made the first time.> That was precisely the argument that I made the first time, albeit maybe not in the form that you wanted to see it. Regards, Dan