Tech Convergence Will Spur Demand for New ADAS Technology

Psychology Today

It is an important thing to recognize that a stock is not a company. The stock of MVIS has gotten kicked in the gut over the last few weeks, probably due to heavy shorting in advance of the recent financing. The quickness and relentlessness of the decline, in the absence of news about the business of the company, leaves people to infer that maybe something's going wrong, there's a problem somewhere with something, blah blah. I know a lot of people who have been in the stock for a while just feeling like they can't take it anymore and they don't want to endure any more of the kind of pain that MVIS longs have had to go through since October started.

It is important to separate the the psychological phenomenon of owning MVIS from the business of operating MVIS. I would suggest that the recent plunge is not an accurate reflection of the health of the business. In fact, the company had a lot less money in the bank back in October when the stock was $6. If you were going to freak out about the state of the company, that could have been the time to do it, right? But now in December, with a fresh $10M, there's a whole lot more room to move. Yet, the stock has been cut in half.

We've had another 3 months of technological progress, at the fastest rates ever. We are very close to the unveiling of Mr. Tokman's Roadmap to 2010, where MVIS investors will begin to see how we get from the (oooh, scary!) world of today, to the promised land of the ubiquitous scanned beam display.

The Roadmap and Vision will take us there.

Now, imagine for a moment that you are an engineer working on, say, the 12-month, $4.4M contract from General Dynamics that Microvision was awarded earlier in the year. You're not stopping work on your project because the stock has tanked. You've got til June 2006 to deliver on:
The 12-month contract will focus on preparing the Microvision HMD System for potential use in attack and utility helicopters, with specific emphasis on continued ruggedization and miniaturization of the HMD system. The previous phase of the program, with Microvision contracting directly with the Army Aviation and Missile Command, culminated in the delivery of a prototype full-color, daylight-readable helmet-mounted display [the Spectrum SD2500]. The new contract is expected to result in an upgrade for that display that will be ruggedized, miniaturized, and soldier-wearable in a package similar to Microvision's Nomad Helmet-Mounted Display System.

So, here it is. We will deliver a full-color, ruggedized wearable display with the astonishing quality of the Spectrum SD2500 in the next six months. That's the facts. That's a big part of the business of being Microvision. Deliver the highest quality display technology in the world to the DoD, to enable better safety and situational awareness for soldiers and pilots in harm's away. When I think about the time I saw the Spectrum, I was awestruck. It is incredible. To imagine that in a similar form factor to the existing Nomad, but small, rugged and ready for battle in the harshest conditions...it will be obvious that there's value in the stock and in the future of the company.

Maybe the psychology is so negative today for whatever reason. I don't really care. I just know that these things can turn on a dime. And that the promise of MVIS-inside at the end of the GE-transplanted Roadmap, and the tangibility of a full color wearable display will be a pretty compelling story.

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