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Biotech / Medical : IMAT - ultrafast tomography for coronary artery disease -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Harry Ellis who wrote (2948)	3/10/1999 11:01:00 AM
From: Bruce Rozenblit	Respond to of 3725

As I understand it, the market for Positron is in Japan where they pay 2 grand for a procedure and want to use it. It has been reported they they have some orders on the books but that only counts when the checks are received. Positron has no money either and is supposed to be pulled out of the grave by Imatron, which is broke too. The CEO has publicly stated that Positron will add 100 million dollars of share holder equity. My question is, will any of us live long enough to see it. It may very well be that Imatron has spent 15 years proving to the medical world that calcium screening is effective and beneficial. That was their window of opportunity to gain a foothold in the market. Now it appears that the big guns in the industry are targeting the application with alternative technologies that can be produced at much lower cost. There are indeed many ways to skin a cat. Look at it this way. If you were a large hospital, would you buy a 2 million dollar machine from a small company that is barely keeping its doors open, or a 1 million dollar machine, that does most of the same things, from a huge established profitable firm? There is no way Imat can compete against a far east manufacturer on a cost basis. Toshiba will go off shore to some third world country or to China to get the production costs as low as possible. Imatron may indeed have the best machine of its type in the world but it just costs way too much to payback. The marketplace probably wants calcium screening but not for an up front cost of 1.8 million. The machine requires a revenue of about 100,000 per month just to break even and at $400 per scan, that's two per hour with no let up. The procedure should cost $800 minimum for the numbers to work. Perhaps the biggest bungle Imat made was establishing way too low a market price for the scan. Its time to stock up on Mylanta.