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Technology Stocks : Ballard Power -world leader zero-emission PEM fuel cells -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jan Johnstone who wrote (1449)	12/17/1997 9:49:00 AM
From: Sid Turtlman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5827

Jan: Ford and Daimler are in a different position than the individual investor. The car companies have huge budgets for R&D, and they regularly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on projects ranging from inquiries into new types of engines to redesigning tail lights in the hopes of saving $.05 per unit. Playing around with fuel cells makes lots of sense for them, but it is just one of many, many projects. They expect a certain number of them to lead to dead ends. I know, for example, that DB is starting a project to develop a gas/electric hybrid, because some other company I am long will be supplying the batteries. If that makes more progress than the fuel cells, they will drop the latter and write it off. It happens all the time. It is no big deal to them. When the Ford deal goes through, Ballard at this price will have a market cap of over US$2 billion. The question for the individual investor is whether that is a reasonable price to pay today for some probability (I think less than 50%, most on this thread would place it a lot higher) times some some earnings perhaps ten years from today, discounted back to the present.