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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ruffian who wrote (23652)	3/2/1999 4:50:00 PM
From: Webster	Respond to of 152472

Iridium will suffer a long, slow death march similar to American Mobile Satellite Corp (SKYC). The money has already been made with Iridium trading during its speculative days. When it comes down to performance this company will have a difficult time. I believe its business model is flawed. Too high equipment costs and too high service costs. The problem for the bulk of traveling executives will be the capital costs. It may be acceptable to get reimbursed for $3.00 per minute for a phone call on an expense report its another thing to get reimbursed a couple of thousand dollars for the phone. Product shortages and not enough trained channels to sell products? Really?? You think ERCY has spin, wait until the next couple of quarters for Iridium. GSTRF should eat their lunch and even GSTRF will have to reduce prices further to an acceptable level. FWIW. Web.

To: Ruffian who wrote (23652)	3/2/1999 11:25:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 152472

Iridium/Globalstar //"...Still, given the pent-up demand that appears to exist for phones and pagers, it is too bad that delays in its service roll-out will prevent Iridium from meeting Q1 targets..."// If there is pent up demand for the handsets, how come their are Kyocera handsets sitting in shops in Akihabara and Fujisawa? There were no Motorola handsets, so maybe those are sold out. Has anyone seen Iridium handsets on sale anywhere and if so, were there Motorola handsets in stock [other than a demonstration model]? Iridium is reminiscent of Eurotunnel. A huge, capital intensive project designed to make work and money for the contractors, rather than the public shareholders. It took a similar length of time to develop and cost a similar amount of money [Eurotunnel ended up a LOT more than Iridium but many billions of pounds]. In the end, the shareholders lost their money and the banks took priority on payment. If Iridium goes bust, somebody else will buy it, operate it and do okay because the operating costs are very small. The new owners might be the banks because they can operate a capital intensive business without too much trouble. Very icky looking for Iridium shareholders. But all good for Globalstar and Qualcomm. Especially good for Qualcomm who will produce most of the handsets and they will be in big demand at high margins as Globalstar and service providers cuts minute prices to get the system working and act as a lever for Vodafone and others to sell terrestrial minutes. The cut price minutes will stymie the Inmarsat plans and stop any other competitors joining in the pie-in-the-sky feast, leaving Globalstar as sole [more or less] supplier of an effective LEO network. Once again, Qualcomm is set to have a great victory! Mqurice