Dear CFO, I am curious how you got back to North America so quickly from the Dubai Airshow. The show was from 15th to the 19th and here you are writing on Agoracom on the 19th at 11:32 am. Did you just go for two days? The Astrium Star news release came out on the 16th. That means you would have had to have been there until at least the 16th. However, no one at the airshow really knew anything about that announcement until the 17th as it was not until then did anyone notice and only then did people start talking about it. So here we are on the 17th in Dubai to which you might have learned about Star and the Astrium deal. Perhaps you left right away on the 18th first thing in the morning, which means that you would arrive in North America late evening on the 18th. Now taking into consideration how jet lagged I felt the day after I got back I would hardly believe you had enough time to research anthing let alone find Agoracom to write what you wrote and when you wrote it and again at 4:30 in the afternoon.
Perhaps you visited the Star Navigation booth. How else would you know about Star. If you had I would say good for you for doing some due diligence. Perhaps you could describe the booth. Perhaps you could tell me the colour of the carpeting. Perhaps you could tell me the booth across from Star Navigation as it was a main attraction and would be very noticeable, one could not miss that.
So now lets take a look at your uninformed decision to buy SNA shares and the buyers remorse you feel because you had so much time to compare SNA to AMA. Curious when you bought the stock and how much you paid as it gives me a time line you see. Then I could extrapulate a little more.
As to AMA and their sales team. I have nothing but respect for them. They have done an amazing job but now lets do a little SNA vrs AMA.
SNA has been an R&D company for the past 10 years. All their time effort and money went into developing the best technology in the world to day (imho) to replace the existing black box. Only in the last 6 months has Star started a sales and marketing strategy and my goodness look at what they have achieved so far.
You see Astrium put out a call for anyone with technology that had live data streaming from aircraft. Back in August the internet and aviation magazines were inundated by a news release by AMA on Aug 11th. In that news release AMA said they had the product that could do this. Astrium then started to reasearch all the technology available. Now lets look at Astrium. A company that had gone through tremendous stress because of the Air France crash and the fact that it was an airbus that crashed which was made by EADS/Astrium. No one could find the black box, the information that came from ACARS was limited at best and could not pinpoint where the aircraft was and what really caused the crash. Over 600 million Euros was spent trying to locate those black boxes.
So Astrium was using the platform ARINC which ACARS runs off of as well as a system that Airbus has called Airman. This technology basically failed.
I know several other companies as well as AMA were all over Astrium to choose their technology but guess what. The largest producer of aircraft in the world chose Star Navigation. So it is not me or anyone else that says Star Navigation has the best technology available, it is Astrium.
