Guess what?Last week, I was heading to Phoenix, and guess who was on the plane with me? Someone EXTREMELY high up from Wi-Lan (Let’s not drop names, OK?) Anyway, we had a long discussion about Wi-lan’s future… Here’s a few teasers:
First of all, I asked about Breezcom (remember, last week today’s news wasn’t out yet) and their announcement from Tele2…. And how come Wi-Lan didn’t get the contract? Apparently, the truth is Breezcom has been playing word games… the $2.0 M figure they’ve mentioned was cleverly drafted by their lawyers to mislead the public… the fact is that (if you read their release carefully you’ll see) the $2M figure was for ALL THE SALES TO DATE since inception… i.e their most recent sale was for MUCH MUCH LESS! As we saw today, I was assured that Wi-Lan WILL get the lion’s share of the orders. To add my two-bits to the speculation… I guess by signing a 2 year contract, Tele2 must have gotten a bit of an advance discount… we all know that this time next year, “the modems” will be cheaper…
I wanted a re-assurance that CIBC’s $200 a share target price is still valid… so I asked if Wi-Lan is on track for the $21M in sales that CIBC has been basing their values on…. The answer I got was very re-assuring… So I expect Wi-Lan to be around the $490/share area by December 2000…. As you know, it is not WIN’s policy to announce MOU…, but if you add up all of WIN’s MOU’s in the pipeline, I can imagine that the number would be close to $1 Billion…. However, as you can expect, not all of these usually come to fruition… BUT $100M could be a very achievable number for this year… IMHO…
The ASIC chips are on time for release as scheduled…. And that will help speed up things, and lower cost….
I asked about LOOK and CISCO… and what LOOK is rolling out in Ontario…. The answer I got was what I already was guessing: What LOOK is offering has nothing to do with what WIN is going to do…. CISCO has nothing to do with them, except a promise of some future support. No real commitment… Nothing close to V-OFDM in the horizon for a LONG LONG LONG time…
C-OFDM is a joke! It is only a way to broadcast voice to cheap receivers…. Again no two-way data…or video… UBS is fiddling with C-OFDM to attempt to get two-way transmission… however if they succeed, they would be infringing on both Wi-lan and Philips patents… however right now it’s not worth suing them… because they’ll probably use that as another opportunity to seek attention… like: “hooray! we’re getting sued by Wi-Lan!!!!!! The fact is C-OFDM is not capable of doing what WIN is doing…so it is a non-issue…
About the ultra-wide-band or whatever new technology we’ve been reading about last few weeks… coming out of California… again, this is absolutely no threat to wi-lan… what they’re proposing is a very experimental project for which they got the approval and support of the commission to work on… but, according to scientists (and I can’t understand the details… let alone explain it….) this process does cause a lot of spiking in frequency and it would interfere with many other sensitive transmissions…. Airplanes, cell-phones, medical equipment, etc., and its commercial use is guaranteed NOT TO BE ALLOWED.
What else? There’s a lot more but maybe another time… what’s important is that Wi-Lan’s success is certain. The company’s future is ABSOLUTELY SOLID…. And WE SHALL SEE A SHARE PRICE THAT WILL MAKE EVERYONE VERY HAPPY! SOON.