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Microcap & Penny Stocks : POCI-Precision Optics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TERRY MURPHY who wrote (22)	1/2/1998 11:24:00 AM
From: craig crawford	Respond to of 255

<< I wonder if this might not be the next Uniphase. UNPH was a mere $5 stock only a few years back. >> Whoa, slow down. I think comparisons to UNPH are a wee bit pre-mature. << I think this is the most undervalued WDM play around. Any thoughts? Terry >> We'll have to see. This company right now is trading on notions, not current fundamentals.

To: TERRY MURPHY who wrote (22)	1/4/1998 3:36:00 PM
From: Lancelot de La Rochelle	Respond to of 255

Well, I sure hope you turn out to be right. There are quite a few hurdles to be overcome though. First of all, POCI is not financially strong. $1.8 milion in the bank does not allow for a whole lot of R&D, let alone marketing. So the product has to be of very high quality in order to catch customers' eyes. I think recent developments speak for themcelves. The financial weakness is well countered with management strenght. POCI had only $.9 million worth of sales in the September quarter, yet they lost a meager 300K. That is amazing to me. On the WDM front, I have mixed, but generally good feelings. The bad news is that the expression, to paraphrise from the press release: "sales (of filters) to occur later next year", does not make me feel comfortable that any such sales would occur in the first calendar quarter, as was indicated in the September quarter press release, but I hope that I'm wrong and it's just me <g>. What do you think about this particular issue? Another word from the release that's bothering me is "proprietary," in the description of the customer's device. What is that supposed to mean? Are there any interoperability issues to be raised later? I don't have an answer. I just hope "proprietary" doesn't mean something other than "(very) advanced, unavailable to compertitors." To put it in a different way, I hope the customer is Lucent and not Osicom... The good news is that the filter is good enough for 8 channel DWDM devices, while a "simple," 2 to 4 channel filter was promised. POCI clearly overdelivered. And development efforts on more complex filters are ongoing. Now, this is especially encouraging, and I hope this turns out to be as fruitful as the '97 effort. On a different note, if thin film and WDM filter sales pick up and flush the company with cash a year down the road, I hope POCI gets out of the medical optics business and concentrates on the above two. Maybe I am underestimating medical as opposed to semicon and telecom sales, but you only need to look at your own example, UNPH, to see what those two can do for a company, as opposed to what endocouplers, endoscopes, etc,, have brought to optical medical device makers - relatively not much. Regards, Lancelot