RE:The costs keep adding up… anyone else keeping track?It looks like you've pumped up every Q4 estimated regular cost or special charge to the highest number imaginable. This not a disinterested list.
How on earth did you come up with $3 million for Paul Hill severance? For 1.5 years? I would have guessed the severance would have primarily involved Paul keeping a big chunk of his not-yet-vested options. Regardless, $3 million looks over the top.
Debenture financing costs? Even if your number were close, the obvious response would be that it's a one-time thing and part of the financing reality. In light of how the world has unfolded since then, it looks like it was a good thing that the financing was done.
In the final analysis, even if there is to be a one-time charge of, say, $5-10 million, well, two things.
First, it will be one-time. Markets will move past it and ultimately be more concerned with what the resulting Quarterhill looks like.
Second, relative to both:
(1) even a half-decent sale price for Wilan and
(2) the value of the post-Wilan ITS business,
any Q4 one-time charge will be peanuts.
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At the end of the day even the value in the sale of Wilan will be hardly consequential relative to what the company is (or isn't) able to achieve in ITS.
ETC, from its website, has clearly put a great deal of effort into its congestion pricing (CP) offering, which is sort of a very sophisticated 2-dimensional form of tolling. Currently, if I have this right, the only CP project being built in the US is in New York City. These tend to be a lot bigger as projects than single highway tolling systems.
New York is certainly not going to be the last city in the US to create a CP zone. It's a good bet that, in time, especially as the technology improves, there will be dozens of them.
If / when ETC lands its first major CP deal that will be monster news.
I'm pretty confident that it's a question of WHEN and not IF. That said, I have no proof.