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| Ev Archive for January 1998 |
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| 1241 messages, last added Wed Aug 08 18:41:28 2001 |
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EVLN(EF wins ext. for Deutsche Post AG postal zinc-air batt van project)
EVLN(EF wins ext. for Deutsche Post AG postal zinc-air batt van project)
[The Internet Electric Vehicle List News. For Public EV informational
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--- {EVangel}
Electric Fuel looks to cellphone market
03:11 p.m Jan 30, 1998 Eastern By David Rosenberg
JERUSALEM, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Israeli technology company Electric Fuel
Ltd said on Friday it planned to sell a disposable cellular phone
battery with a 30-day standby life at the start of 1999.
Chairman Robert S. Ehrlich said Electric Fuel would probably look to
raise capital on the stock market in a year's time to finance the new
business.
``We're currently self-financing, but when we get ready for full
production we'll seek money.''
He said the capital raising would be either a secondary offering in
Electric Fuel itself or an initial offering in a newly spun-off
cellphone batteries unit.
The company lost $5.1 million on revenues of $3.9 million in the first
nine months of 1997.
The initial target of the disposable battery will be ``power users''
-- people who chat on their mobiles up to 700 minutes a month and
often find their re-chargables have expired on them mid-day, Ehrlich
told Reuters.
Rechargeable batteries are the norm for cellphones, but Electric Fuel
thinks it can entice callers with a zinc-air battery it originally
created to power vehicles as big as a city bus. ``The only kind of
disposable that can conceivably do the job is zinc-air,'' said
Ehrlich.
Market studies say users will not give up their rechargeables except
for a long-life disposable.
``We believe 30 days is the cut-off point for people's preference for
one-time, throw-away batteries,'' said Yehuda Harats, Electric Fuel's
president.
Electric Fuel it has already developed a battery for digital mobile
phones with an 30-day standby life; for the analogue phones, Ehrlich
said the company was close to a similar performance.
The market potential is huge. The number of cellphone users worldwide
is expected to grow to 800 million in 2003 from about 200 million
today.
A 4.5 percent market share would yield Electric Fuel revenues of $103
million, according to company figures.
Zinc-air batteries, which produce power by creating a reaction between
zinc and oxygen, have been around for a century and the technology is
not proprietary.
But Ehrlich said his company had an edge that should keep it ahead of
possible competitors in the cellphone market.
Armed with this technology, Electric Fuel hopes to form alliances with
cellphone makers as well as consumer product groups. Talks have begun
with some companies, but Ehrlich declined to name them.
He said cellphone makers will sell Electric Fuel batteries with their
phones and the consumer products companies will take care of the
after-market. Electric Fuel envisages replacement batteries, with a
retail price as low as $4.95, being sold at checkout lines.
Electric Fuel also wants to licence production of the batteries.
Ehrlich said development of batteries for electric vehicles is
continuing with the company recently winning an extension of a
long-running project with Deutsche Post AG to power postal vans with
zinc-air batteries.
But Ehrlich conceded that their short-term prospects for
commercialisation were slim because of intense lobbying by the auto
and oil industries.
...
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Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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