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Technology Stocks : KVH Industries, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bridge Player who wrote (2420)	8/14/2003 8:41:40 AM
From: Sector Investor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7249

The A5 is alive and well! Unterberg has issued another update this morning. dar on Yahoo! isn't going to like this at all, as they say there are no manufacturing issues, merely a delay in getting initial parts. It's going to be hard to twist these facts. How many shorts do we have now? Run, Forest, run! <VBG> ============================================================== On Wednesday, we had the opportunity to see a demonstration of the TracVision A5 Middletown, RI. We drove in a Lincoln Navigator installed with five separate screens. During the drive through Middletown, the A5 worked very well. The signal was periodically interrupted by foliage and cliffs, but only briefly, before signal recapture. The quality of connectors and monitors will impact viewing experience, which is a risk to KVH since they do not have complete control over this. Volume production of units awaits plastic exterior housing, an injection molded piece. The company's supplier indicated that the pieces will be available in the next day or two. As we have previously written (see our note on August 4, 2003), we believe KVH is launching a controlled roll-out in mid-August starting with dealers in Arizona, California, Texas and Florida. Robotic cells are being fine tuned for volume manufacturing and production could ramp quickly. We believe there are no manufacturing issues that would impede production of as much as 20,000 units next year. For 3Q03 we are estimating total A5 unit sales of 600. We estimate total unit sales of 2,000 for 4Q03 and 9,000 for 2004. The company is concentrating the current demo activity for the benefit of its distribution channels and partners. Dealer reaction remains good and interest is high. In our last survey of over 100 dealers conducted in late July/early August, we encountered many dealers who pre-sold multiple units without the benefit of seeing the product in action. We believe some of the dealers that showed less than enthusiastic responses are correlated with those that have not been educated by the company on what the product does and how well it works. The demo will go on the road in the following weeks and we believe excitement will build as dealers see how well the product works. We maintain our Buy/Buy recommendation and estimates as we are optimistic about the launch and the product's success. We believe the sale of the A5 will be limited more by the company's carefully controlled roll out of the product, rather than end-user reaction to the product.