I would like to know what the publicly traded companies are the most
leveraged in bluetooth technology. I am not looking for investment
advice, rather, I am simply looking for a short list of companies that
are very dependent upon the success/failure of bluetooth technology
and therefore are the most leveraged "pure plays". In other words, if
I want to bet on bluetooth technology without having the investment
diluted by other technologies/activities a company might be involved
in, what are some of the stocks I should look at? Thanks.

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Clarification of Question by kow-ga on 26 Apr 2004 09:15 PDT

probonopublico,

thanks for the input. sony and ericsson are involved with bluetooth,
but they are also involved in many other activities and technologies
that are not dependent on bluetooth. i am specifically looking for the
companies who *most* revolve around bluetooth for the success/failure
of their operations. (e.g., a company like Widcomm whose primary
activity is bluetooth development... problem is that Widcomm isnt
publicly traded and is about to be absorbed into a much bigger
company, Broadcom, which brings up the dilution issue i mentioned in
my first post.) im looking for companies along the same lines as
Widcomm... i doubt there are any *as* highly leveraged in bluetooth in
them, but im just interested in knowing the next best options.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 26 Apr 2004 09:36 PDT

kow-ga,

Yahoo Finance only lists 10 companies with a heavy-enough involvement
in Bluetooth that the word shows up in their company description. 
However, only three of these are publicly traded:

Telefon AB LM Ericsson 
COMPUTER ACCESS 
DSP Group Inc 
Cambridge Silicon Radio plc
Centurion Wireless Technologies, Inc.
TTP Communications plc 
Zeevo, Inc.  
WIDCOMM, Inc. 
GCT Semiconductor, Inc. 
Tadiran Communications Ltd.

How many publicly-traded companies were you expecting as an answer to your question?

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Clarification of Question by kow-ga on 26 Apr 2004 10:28 PDT

pafalafa,

thats what im looking for. could u please let me know which of those
are traded and what their ticker symbols are? if u wanna include any
additional info that would be appreciated, but basically what i was
looking for was just a list of companies most heavily involved in
bluetooth and you seem to have done that. thx.

---

Clarification of Question by kow-ga on 26 Apr 2004 10:30 PDT

addendum: 

by "additional info" i meant that if u wanted to dig a little deeper
to see if u cant scrounge up any additional companies outside the
yahoo finance descriptions, id appreciate it. your list is right on
target though.

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Clarification of Question by kow-ga on 26 Apr 2004 10:34 PDT

sorry to keep clarifying in bits and pieces instead of all at once...
i just keep thinking of more to say...

another way of expressing what i am looking for is "IF bluetooth
technology were to explode in popularity beyond the wildest of
expectations, what companies would stand to directly benefit the most,
regardless of the business/economic environment?". i want to invest in
bluetooth's future, but since there is no way to literally invest in
bluetooth itself, i want to know what companies would be most likely
to rise in share price should the technology blow past expectations
(its already popular, but some doubt its viability and growth long
term).

Hello kow-ga,

Thanks for giving me the go-ahead on this.


You can search the Yahoo Finance site here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/search

A search on "bluetooth" will find company descriptions that contain
this term (which would only be present in descriptions of companies
heavily vested in this technology).

The results include the 10 companies I listed earlier, the first three
of which are publicly traded companies under the symbols:

Telefon AB LM Ericsson ERICY 

COMPUTER ACCESS CATZ 

DSP Group Inc DSPG 

=====

While still in Yahoo Finance, clicking on the company name of symbol
will take you to a more detailed information about the company.  For
instance, clicking on CATZ will get you to:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CATZ

and then clicking on the link labeled "Profile" on the left hand side
of the page takes you to:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=CATZ

-----

Computer Access Technology Corporation offers advanced design and
production verification systems for the Bluetooth, ethernet, fiber
channel, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 1394
InfiniBand, PCI (peripheral component interface) Express, SCSI (small
computer system interface), Serial ATA (advanced technology
attachment) and USB (universal serial bus) standards, as well as
Serial Attached SCSI. The Company's development products generate,
capture, filter and analyze high-speed communications traffic...

-----

At the bottom of the profile is a hyperlink to "Expanded Business
Description" -- clicking this takes you to:

http://yahoo.investor.reuters.com/FullDesc.aspx?target=/stocks/quickinfo/companyprofile/fulldescription&ticker=CATZ

with a lot of additional detail, such as:

Bluetooth development products offered by CATC include
BTTracer/Trainer, Merlin and Merlin II and Merlin Mobile. The
BTTracer/Trainer, introduced in the fourth quarter of 2002, combines a
Bluetooth protocol analyzer and exerciser into a single CATC universal
protocol analyzer system (UPAS) module. The BTTracer/Trainer
automatically synchronizes the exerciser with the analyzer to easily
capture test results, and its interfaces make it simple to inject
user-defined errors and jitter or write complete verification test
suites using a simple scripting language. Merlin and Merlin II,
introduced in the fourth quarter of 2003, are non-intrusive design
verification systems that provide Bluetooth network traffic capture,
display and analysis, allowing designers to quickly identify and
correct design issues, as well as assist manufacturers to pre-screen
devices for standard compliance and interoperability. The Merlin
Mobile is the Company's second-generation Bluetooth protocol analyzer.
It provides all the Bluetooth capture and decode capabilities of the
Merlin system, allowing customers to quickly identify issues or areas
of interest...

==========

One more link of interest to you might be the Bluetooth ?Special
Interest Group? of companies:

https://www.bluetooth.org/

They have l-o-o-o-n-g lists of member companies involved in one way or
another with Bluetooth.  It doesn?t clearly sort out the pure plays
from others, but it?s a good resource just the same.  The actual
company lists are at:

https://www.bluetooth.org/foundry/sitecontent/document/member_directory

and are sorted into categories of ?Promoters?, ?Associates? and ?Adopters?.

==========

I hope this is the type of information you were after.  Before rating
this answer, let me know if anything here is not clear, or if you need
additional information.  Just post a Request for Clarification and let
me know how I can assist you further.

Here's to successful investing...!

pafalafa-ga

Sony Ericsson

Bluetooth.com has a list of bluetooth products and the companies that
make them.  From that list, the publicly traded companies with the
most products listed are:

Sony (SNE) 48 products
Motorola (MOT) 34 products
Toshiba (TOSBF.PK) 32 products
Nokia (NOK) 26 products
Ericsson (ERICY) 25 products
National Semiconductor (NSM) 19 products

These are all fairly large and diversified companies so you still have
the dilution problem.  Still, I hope this helps you some.

-Kevin

Take a look at Extended Systems (XTND).  Not a pure bluetooth company,
all the 100% bluetooth companies I could find were privately held, but
XTND seems to be putting a fairly significant effort into bluetooth
product development.  They have a website at
http://www.extendedsystems.com, you can look at some of the company
profile & mission statement, bluetooth products, bluetooth history,
etc.