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To: nigel bates who wrote (13943)5/19/1998 4:40:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 17305
 
*AV*--Millipore is a filtration company so I would like to defer to the expertise of Robert Newton on this subject. My professional experience with Millipore products over the years has been very gratifying. They have a quality product that I came to rely on with the semiconductor manufacturing confines. I would imagine this to be the same in the less stringent bio-medical and commercial sectors it deals in.

Perkin Elmer is another story. These were the same guys that dominated the lithography market for more than a decade with their projection aligners. They owned the US market entirely with some small unsuccessful forays by two competitors. One had a product that was junk while the other company (Pacific Rim) infringed and disregarded the Perkin Elmer patents. Perkin Elmer sold off those assets as their dominance slipped and their replacements stepper products did not "cut the mustard".

Perkin Elmer was always a superior instrumentation company and continues to be such in that regard. I am unsure of the market they deal into but if DNA sequencing and such becomes big and they could be a player, they have decades of respectability behind them. this is a formula for success. I will do some checking but I do not see them as a take over candidate but rather being able to leverage its strengths and remain independent.

Andrew

BTW-I went surfing and found this link on Hypres, Inc.
hypres.com

They are still in business, and the pictur of the unit that he said he would build is smack dab on the website. All in all, I think I made the right move not going to work there since it is still privately owned and has just a few million dollars in revenues. However, it was an exciting opportunity at the time. This was a case where I did not take "the road less travelled" and might be the better for it.

It is interesting reading and I wonder if they could be a player in the areas you are talking about.



To: nigel bates who wrote (13943)5/19/1998 7:43:00 PM
From: Donald Isenhower  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 17305
 
Nigel,

Just a couple of comments in regards to high-temperature superconductor companies. Of the ones you listed in a previous message, AMSC is not tied into telecommunications like SCON and ISCO. Its work is with electric power applications such as HTC leads for superconducting magnets, HTC transformers, industrial motors, power conditioning, etc. Their most important backers are tied in with producing and distributing electricity and they are making good progress on moving towards production on several fronts. Their SMES devices are probably one of the most promising products, which for those who don't know what they are, they are basically a UPS with the potential of serving that purpose for a much larger current requirement than a UPS for a computer. The claim AMSC makes for a potential market is interesting, i.e., that short power outages cause significant losses in an industrial setting and HTC storage devices could allow companies to ride these out without any problem. If this makes anybody curious, you can go read the AMSC thread. There aren't all that many messages there and you may find it interesting who is investing in them.

In regards to one other point on HTC products. It really isn't necessary for one to find a room-temperature superconductor for the area to take off. The SCON products are run with their own electronic cooler (which I believe SCON was/is selling to cool ICs), and seem to be near the point where they could take off in sales. For those who haven't thought about the filters used in cell phone networks, just work out the impact of improving the range of each cell station by 10-20%.

Finally, I put all of these companies in the group of stocks that will either be worth 10 times what I paid for them or be bankrupt in 5-10 years. Since people here like shorter term plays it seems, be aware that these are far from companies with any type of long-term history to guess from as to what they will do next and trade very thinly, but if you look at a daily plot of AMSC you can see that you could have made some more car payments here recently!

Truth in advertising:

I own some AMSC and have been tempted by SCON. I decided to go with AMSC because they would give specific companies they were dealing with when they sold a SMES system or a transformer, whereas SCON apparently can only say "a major telecommunication firm is evaluating our ...." and I don't know enough about that field to feel comfortable not knowing for sure just who was testing their products.

Donald