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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (4213)	4/27/1999 6:45:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29987

Yes, ICO is to be a 15,000 km orbit compared with 1,414km for Globalstar, so ICO will get an annoying delay in voice but it won't be as bad as GEOs, though nearly half as bad. No voice delay for Globalstar [well, probably undetectable for nearly everyone]. Quite right, Globalstar doesn't set retail prices but might discount in conjunction with regional service providers. The peculiar schizophrenic relationship the USA has with Free Trade, Free Markets, Supply and Demand and price means there are squawks when prices increase. But Globalstar subscribers will be, usually, more intelligent, so they'll have more than a passing familiarity with the idea that things in short supply are higher priced. Before anyone gets on their high horse and thinks I'm Yankee bashing, the same situation applies here and pretty much everywhere. Chairman Mao and Pol Pot 'equalized' a lot of people. So did Stalin. The USA and NZ do it via the ballot box, which is still economically destructive but at least the number of bodies is relatively few. Unfortunately for your idea of Down Under and Up Here pricing, it won't work. That had been my original idea, but was shot down in Feb 1996 when I learned that minutes are [almost] equally valuable everywhere. If they are not sold in NZ, they will be sold a bit later in the USA. So prices need to be much the same everywhere. The key to it is the batteries in the satellites. They carry the electricity from one area to another where it can be discharged on valuable calls, not sold to the stingebuckets in New Zealand. What's Globalstar going to do when AirTouch is using all the minutes available at 40c per minute wholesale when they could be sold 15 minutes later for $1 per minute? That will be a pretty crappy deal for we Globalstar shareholders who will be subsidizing AirTouch profits. No thanks! When the satellites leave the USA with flat batteries and go into eclipse, coming out over Asia with big demand and no juice left in the batteries, do you think the customers there are going to be very pleased to be told that AirTouch scoffed the lot at bargain prices? As a Globalstar shareholder, I won't be at all impressed. Demand is going to be very lumpy, so management of minutes available and the satellite battery resource is going to be very sensitive and the key to the money Globalstar makes. Good management and we'll be in clover, bad management and subscribers will be returning their phones, competitors will eat our lunch and profits will be much smaller. The contracts with service providers are going to be one big headache acting as a barrier to rational pricing. Maurice