mcbain....he's not just a super hero on the Simpson's, you know....
FWIW, I endorse the caution not to invest based on anything you read on a chat board...I also agree McB is about as credilbe and balanced a poster as any I've read on here over the many years I've been reading them....I've mentioned the stock elsewhere and complimented the quailty of this Board although I do not own shares yet...
I think I posted here a few months ago when I first started some DD on the company, but have not gotten in due to low volume, tight trading range, and still trying to wrap my head around what they have with that Thermal Frag process technology...it is an interesting story though so I came back to see what was up after recent volume jumps...
McB...some questions if you'd be inclined to reply...
(1)do you have any sense from discussions with the company as to when the commercialization of this technology is likely to produce actual revenue?....when is the critical point in the sales cycle for them?....do they have to sell it to a potential miner at the feasibility study stage?...meaning it could be many years more before they would actually see any cash flow from implementing it if and only if that particular mine goes ahead?
(2) Someone commented about the strenght or weakness of the thing being patented....well, a patent helps but it is not bullet proof protection by a long shot....plenty of firms, in foreign jursidictions particularly, do not care much about intellectual property rights...and by the time you litigate for infringement (if you can afford to do so) you may have lost the battle in the meantime.....even if you win, you may have trouble effectively realizing on your judgement...(remember that the firm that sued RIM was a group of lawyers that bought those patents from an estate and they specialize in this...that situation is the exception rather than the rule)...so my question is more to the practical barriers to competition rather than the legal ones....how unique is this thing and how hard would it be for someone to knock it off?...is there intellectual capital at RMI that would make it difficul for someone to repeat the invention....or is this a toaster and once out there anyone will be able to reverse engineer and copy it?
(3) As I read about this technology, I started to wonder where its real value was....commercializing and licensing it versus keeping it in-house to provide what might be an unbelievable advantage for development projects....what I mean is that if 1/1000 potential mines turn into an actual mine....does it make more sense to try to license to that ratio of customers versus keep the thing to yourself and be able to beat any bidder on any project in the future because you can go and mine it at substantially less cost with your pateneted technology than anyone else can?....by way of analogy, in the current mining boom, would one rather invent a drill and license it....or invent the drill and be the only one with it?....the analogy breaks down at some level because there are lots more drillers than there are people who are going to mine so the correct customer base/business model may not be the same...
Regards