Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Trimble Navigation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: arun gera who wrote (2067)	1/1/1998 4:22:00 PM
From: Yin Shih	Respond to of 3506

<<Terra by Trimble was supposed to address that market, but has not had much success yet.>> Terra was a small struggling avionics manufacturer before the TRMB buyout. I think it sold mostly on the basis of cost benefits for those unwilling or unable to pay the price of a Bendix/King package. What TRMB got for $2.7M was a going business and trade name, virtually complete avionics product line (though I think that excludes an autopilot product, which can cost as much as the rest of the avionics) to complement the GPS electronics (TRMB had supplied the Terra GPS radio as a re-label the fascia deal), and an established customer base. The main immediate benefit was to assure potential customers that Terra wasn't going to disappear and that it now had the capital and stability of TRMB behind it. Whether it would ever become a serious competitor to B/K would depend on the investment made in the Terra label thereafter. I don't have notes handy, but from memory, a typical full-up Terra panel with GPS might run about $12K. The Cirrus selection of Terra avionics provides a potential 100-200 planes in the near future. So this is perhaps $1-2M in business. We would need a lot more of these to make it worthwhile. I wasn't sure it was the right move at the time, and I'm still not sure. <<Actually, it is new and add-on business for the next 2-3 years.>> Agreed that there is still good revenue potential in airline and military conversions. By "new or add-on" I meant a new market opportunity not previously penetrated. <<Is there really no performance difference between the hand-helds and panel mounted products? Would you use a hand-held for precision landing when WAAS becomes active?>> Hand-helds are actually more feature rich than panel mounts right now, the main feature being gray-scale high-res moving maps. I think this is because panel mounts are low-volume expensive products that take long certification times. Hand-helds can be updated and released on 6-12 month cycles while a TSO (meaning IFR certification) is lengthy and expensive. As far as receiver performance, hand-helds went over to 8 channel receivers and 12 channel receivers very quickly, while I think recent panel mount offerings are still at 8 channels and just starting to go to 12 channels. A hand-held with an integral antenna will have lower signal reception performance than a panel-mount with exterior antenna, but it doesn't cost too much to add an exterior antenna and a panel-mount antenna jack for the hand-held. The other benefit is that a TSO'd panel mount must have RAIMS. RAIMS is an integrity monitor which alerts the pilot that navigation information is no longer reliable allowing him to abort an approach as soon as possible. Without RAIMS, the FAA would not allow any GPS to be TSO'd. Except for RAIMS, there should be little difference between a handheld or panel-mount under WAAS. So far no hand-held has offered RAIMS, though it shouldn't be too difficult to add the circuitry and firmware. <<At $1000 a piece at retail, at 40,000 units a year (four year obsolescence, 170,000 active planes), it is only a $40 million annual market. Or are you talking higher priced products?>> Garmin is the one to beat right now, though Lowrance and Apollo were right behind them last year. Trimble released a moving map handheld based on the Casio Zoomer PDA, which I bought. It was a good shot, but they had problems getting the response and reliability up due to some issues with the Zoomer OS. They ended up withdrawing the product after 2-3 months and buying back the units or exchanging them for FlightMate Pro's. The market price range in hand-helds is currently $600 to $1100. But for hand-helds the market potential is more than active general aviation planes. A large number of planes are rented out or jointly owned and very few rental planes have paid the price to install a panel-mount. Many pilots who rent regularly that want the benefits of GPS have no choice but to buy a hand-held. As a result, the market potential is as much as the number of licensed pilots which is more like 600,000. Yin