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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry Brubaker who wrote (24766)	9/20/2001 10:43:07 PM
From: Rich Wolf	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27311

<<Any revised estimates for when we hit that $250 to $300 million?>> Sorry to have taken so long to respond, I was out of the country. The tech recession has hit all sectors, and there has been nearly no growth in demand, and no reason to upgrade to a new technology for simply 10% improvement in specs, e.g., when the low variable cost of production for liquid electrolyte lithium ion cells, together with overcapacity the last few years, has made entry of new products less profitable. My best estimate would be that sometime next year it is possible that the newly-arrived equipment could have been validated, and products sampled and selected, and that those products will be based on new and higher density phosphate-based laminates, and ultimately that demand may possibly have recovered sufficiently, to enable orders to have come online to fill a large fraction of the capacity of the new assembly equipment. Maybe two years, though, given the state of the world economy. We shall see. I can run my Inspiron for 8 hours on dual liquid electolyte batteries. The bar is continually raised. Also, I do not discount the possibility that the Goodenough group could produce comparable cells using their phosphate patent, and not being interested in production, could try to do an end-run by licensing before Valence does. Again, we shall see. If the Goodenough patent can be used to make cells comparable to those based on the Valence patents, I would expect Sony to be their first licensee. That's where I would watch for early entry, or else from Hitachi. Tough time to be long tech stocks. Shorts again profited this week. I still think shorting should be made illegal. It primarily results in instability and allows for manipulation of the natural market mechanisms. Allowing for arbitrarily large artificial inflation of the number of shares is inherently destabilizing. Just my opinion.