(Well, now I've got an idea how the MVIS IR guys must feel after a day's work...!)
One thing about MVIS is that you have to be willing to accept that there's risk in your investment. This is not General Electric or Cisco or Oracle yet. This is a company with an extraordinary technology, but no established history of generating shareholder value from that technology.
The investment in MVIS is a bet that with some new strategies and tactics, and continued refinement of the technology -- whether evolutionary or revolutionary in nature -- MVIS will be able to succeed in bringing about the world of the ubiquitous scanned beam display. Whether it's in an endoscope, electronic eyewear, in-vehicle HUDs, printer engines, bar code scanners or who knows what.
I think it's really easy to let the stock price color your perceptions of the company's chances for success. But just as things were not all roses and chocolates with the stock at $6 and not a lot of cash in the bank, things are not so dire as some people seem to be thinking with the stock at $3.27 and a fresh $10M.
The truth must be somewhere in the middle. There are challenges, but there are huge opportunities -- and I think everyone can agree on that.
We're on the cusp of a new year, which sometimes helps people to take a look at things with fresh eyes. Here's what I'll be on the look out for in 2006:
Financing fun. Just so everybody can stop biting their fingernails over it. They'll get their money.
Roadmap to 2010.Tokman's plan should help folks see how we go from where we are today to becoming a real, tangible success. I think this plan will be critically important to establishing a new identity for MVIS. It will help people understand what a share of MVIS represents: the future cash flow from all products based on the MVIS platform. It should help steer the conversation away from worrying about the next slug of money and towards how we are executing against the plan.
Ethicon prototype delivery. If the JNJ guys go into the next phase of the contract, there's going to be much, much better visibility into the company's future revenue stream. This should lead to an improved stock price.
Bosch contract. Maybe that LOI from Bosch can get transformed into an Ethicon-like multi-phase contract leading to MicroHUD being OEMed by Bosch for a specified model year. That would also help give visibility into future revenue and help improve the stock price.
LED Widescreen contract. I think there's a good probability that we'll have to have an actual prototype device in hand before anybody's going to fork over millions of dollars to partner with MVIS to bring a device based on this architecture to market. So, we'll see what happens there. Should a gaming or multimedia company decide to devote some resources towards an MVIS partnership, I'd expect the stock price to really start to get moving.
EELED 'Point Source' contract. In this case, MVIS has a working prototype which many of us have seen as the digital camera electronic viewfinder, based on edge-emitting LEDs. This thing is flat out awesome. The hitch is, these EELEDs are not widely available, and as such the cost per unit is not low enough to get into the kinds of products we'll need to target. The challenge is to convince somebody to start cranking out EELEDs by the tens of millions. This would require a significant investment on the part of the supplier company. There would need to be something really nice at the end of the rainbow for this partner to dive in the pool with us. Give 'em something really special, and we'll just take a little royalty per unit...or something like that.
Next-gen Nomad. We know that MVIS is under contract to deliver full-color, ruggedized and battle ready Nomads to General Dynamics by June 2006. Recent developments in green laser light sources are bringing that next-gen Nomad closer to reality. I think a device like this will probably lead to some nice orders from GD. The recent emphasis on content and applications on the conference call is a sign that the company is starting to get the idea that you need to sell 'solutions' and not just hardware. So I'm looking to see the company work with some augmented reality software companies to really flesh out the software for military Nomad and create an offering that's totally compelling right out of the box. The same principle applies to the transportation/industrial maintentance verticals -- whether it's mono-red or full color, we need killer apps so that the ROI is immediately evident as soon as the device is put on. I hope to see some big steps in this direction during 2006.
DoD Orders. Don't look now, but there's $15.7M in the current version of the DoD appropriations bill for 1,599 Nomads and a bunch of development work by MVIS. Even if the final version of the bill has only half that much, it will still be really significant for the company.
I'm sure I'm leaving some things out, but if we get some of this stuff going, next year is going to be really outstanding. It can be hard to imagine a whole line of successes playing out for us, considering the way the stock has performed and the lack of news over the last few months. But nothing that I've described here is outside the realm of possibility. And these are only some of the opportunities at hand. 2006 could be the year that we get our sea legs and start making real progress towards establishing MVIS as a serious player in the imaging and display space. If it is, those who loaded up in 2005 when everyone was crying in their beers will be feeling like kings.
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