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

To: Yin Shih who wrote (2635)	7/26/1998 9:56:00 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3506

Trimble - The Designer Boutique Is Trimble really a manufacturing company or a "designer" boutique? It seems to serve only the "haute couture" market for designer GPS systems. Take a typical quarter - $75 M in total revenue. About $20 M in land survey, About $15 M in GIS. About $5M in marine, about $10 M in high end avionics. Around $50-55 M of the business is in items that sell for about $40,000 each. That is about 1300 units a quarter. Say 400 units per month. Trimble has about 1100 employees. Just using proportion of the expenses as a guide, I guess about 300 in R&D, 200 in admin and management, and 600 in marketing. So 600 marketing people are selling 400 units a month. Or about 2 units a quarter. That is not very much, is it? And probably 100 units a month is coming from 2 or 3 Avionics orders. Is it really that tough to sell GPS units? You need to spend three man months to sell two units. Do you need such a large sales force to sell that? How can one increase the efficiency of the sales force? Trimble should look at how it manages its sales force and reanalyze its sales and distribution business processes. Would the marketing money be better spent by lowering prices and increasing demand or by advertizing heavily? Just some questions in light of Trimble's inability to raise revenues at a fast pace. Arun