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

To: Joe Brown who wrote (1355)	2/19/1999 7:22:00 PM
From: Goodboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2693

Maybe they should restructure the company so they can do just that. It would be fairly simple too. Just wipe out the publicly traded equity, throw a bone to all of the other equity investors offering them a total of 20 percent ownership of the new Iridium (likely less), give the bondholders 30 to 40 percent equity in return for the forgiveness of 1 billion of the 2.4 billion in debt and give Motorola the balance of the equity as they are the largest creditor and they have everyone else bent over a barrel in the restructuring process (they operate the array under a 5 year deal, no Motorola, no operation). The sad reality of Iridium is that it just cost too much to build and operate against the realities of what subscribers will pay and how often they will use the phone. With their debt load and complicated capital structure (including various parties with conflicts of interest), it is unlikely they would have the financial flexibility on pricing you just speculated upon. Iridium will be around for a long time and it well eventually be sucessful. The problem is that the owners will be different than the current composition. It will likely look like my opening paragraph sometime next year. I guess the upside is that you would lose money on your investment, but your phone would keep working and your bill would get cheaper. By the way, technology is still very much an issue. That point will become clearer as the year progresses.