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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MGV who wrote (3874)	8/22/1998 1:15:00 AM
From: Javelyn Bjoli	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27311

The implication is, get to production as soon as possible, because by late 1999 the Japanese are coming in to eat everyone's lunch. To survive after that, the startups such as VLNC will need: 1) Loyal customer base that has a lot of testing time & expense sunk into VLNC that they don't wish to repeat for a while. 2) Reputation for shipping ever-increasing volumes of product on time, based on fully debugged manufacturing process and well-forecast timeline & strategy for capacity rampup. It is unlikely that the Japanese vendors such as Sanyo will introduce product with a poor manufacturing process. So, if VLNC et al have learned the tricky techniques to volume mfg, they may get lucky and see the Japanese vendors slip their intro date based on unexpected problems. But, once volume capacity starts, the only issue for the Japanese is generally how quickly they are willing to spend money on new plants that will obsolete (expensive) older plants. They can steamroll any startup on capital spending. 3) Lower-cost &/or higher-capacity technology. Plans to migrate to higher-capacity chemistries over time are not icing on the cake, they are key to survival. 4) Strategy for providing customers with full battery pack design & assembly, including internal circuitry and plastics. Barring that, hopefully they can get some money for their patent portfolio and equipment.