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Technology Stocks : IRID - Iridium World Communications IPO Announced! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (1169)	12/18/1998 7:49:00 PM
From: Joe Brown	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2693

Jeff: As I stated in prior posts, I am both an investor in, and a consumer of, IRIDIUM service. Nowhere have I said that I am an analyst; I leave that part of the equation in the hands of people like John Bensche at Lehman, Robert Kaimowitz at ING Barings Furman Selz, etc. They are your best source of detailed financial reports. My MSS file probably contains the information you seek, but I am more interested in "bottom line" conclusions, as opposed to the painstaking detail required to get there. I am delighted to provide on this board any and all firsthand knowledge I possess about IRIDIUM and using the system, and can frequently provide monetary details about certain aspects of the system that I have unearthed myself; but I have no desire to function as an "analyst", in the strictest sense of the word. Having said that, I can tell you that the ongoing costs of which I am aware are essentially contained in the $500 million annual O&M (operation and maintenance) contract Iridium has with Motorola for maintaining the constellation. This pays for replenishment of the satellites should they fail, among other things. I am told this contract is turning out to be a very good thing for Iridium shareholders. Second generation system: If analyst projections are correct, I suspect generation two will be funded from cash flow. Your last question was difficult for me to understand. If you were questioning whether Cuba and Libya have local telcos, I'm sure they do. The U.S. just doesn't happen to care for these countries on a political level, and would rather they didn't possess the means to communicate via handheld satellite phone. How does my geography effect satellite/handset exchange? If by geography, you mean "place on earth", it doesn't; if you mean "what happens when the geography of a place is such that you can't see the sky, the answer is: no call. You asked whether IRIDIUM took into account Globalstar and ICO in the planning of the system. The answer is "of course". I have been told that IRIDIUM believes it has plenty of flexibility to adapt to price in the marketplace, to the extent that a price war may be more deleterious to its competitors that to IRIDIUM. Regards, Jack