chairmans note
Well full year accounts have come again, another year wasted?, or just another year closer to death, but without doubt a turbulent financial year for many industries. Mungkie Assoc. have fortunatly weathered the storms of the financial climat in fine form with our investments spread over a number of areas of endevour risks offset such that pretax profits have risen 37% mainly due to our links with far eastern developers reducing overall development costs, and large orders for our data gathering systems for taxation and census data. Also despite some problems in the communications industies we have managed to forge forward with some promissing projects in the digital television arena as marketing projections based on new revenue collection methods show a major growth for 2003-04. Hardware development investments are starting to move forward to production stages for devices such as our comoditized X PDCA the device using a new I2C LCD driver and ultra low power SOC based around a 386 core. Once the device has been pushed forward in our bespoke data gathering systems we will be ramping up production for consumer volumes for Q3 of 2003 the system is projected to sell for around $29 with standard POSIX/X firmware core, an upgradable architecture based around our new open source PLAGAR asynchronous serial bus design, we are hoping to do for PDA's what the IBM PC did for desktops(A standard architecture).
IPO projections are still on course for late August (as projected the market should bottom out around then, allowing investors to re-capitalise on their options while maximizing tax savings through CG roll-over and taper relief). Our portfolio is well placed to maximize the benefit of the current markets.
Enough of business(at least the real and technical aspects) though as I now continue to my annual thoughts and philosophy diatribe(as always just a badly written flow of thoughts), time was when I looked to the future, now it seems I only look back to the good times, I begin to feel the industry has lost much of the idealism that seemed to be around in the seventies. When I started out in the Electronics industry life and markets seemed so much simpler. Back then there were only two micro processors available, if you could program a PLD and knew RPL you were an expert and could do just about anything. I remember taking a business plan containing just two paragraphs to barclays mercantile and raising a credit line of 4 million (and that was when 4 million was BIG money). Now days it seems we need such a huge amount of planning, marketing, design, and technical projections that I find it amazing that anyone can handle the tasks required for project management. Most projects require multidisciplinary experts as leaders, we need to know how to deal with what people want and need, and find ways to give it to them in such a way that they feel they are getting value for money, yet we must make profit. As computer and electronics have moved into the consumer market so bespoke products have decreased in value and thus reduced in profitability, "big players" have moved on to mass production of hardware and improved usability of software allowing the small contractor to move into this bespoke development area. The open source arena has swelled to great proportions giving the major developers huge resources for improved beta testing and bug tracking. There are far more developers but it seems far fewer that can actually fulfill the demands of the complex projects that are driving the real industry developments. A few years back I interviewed the Rasterman about contractual obligations and marketing for one of our proposals for an embedded project. I realised that he actually had no idea about dealing with legal matters relating to marketing a product and handling business partnerships and the consultation process between distributors (Raster then went on to design the UI for windows XP and strangly seemed to lose all his "open souce" and "linux on the desktop" evangelism). This just shows that some of the most talented programmers really just don't have the ability to put their talent to commercial profitability unless managed by someone else. I also find it strange the way business's have suddenly matured due to the financial climate, the new industry of internet, entertainment, and information technology have moved from the slack, laidback, practical joking hackers to more profit oriented greysuit brigade but these suits have failed to see the market to be exploited. As always what sells a product is three factors the product, the price, the marketing, get one wrong and you usually end up with failure and no amount of business speak of paradigms, leveraging, standardising, blah, blah etc..... .
It has been a revelation to see the feedback that has occured from some of our "gonzo black marketing" techniques, and much more of this type of marketing is going to be used in future. So in closing let me reiterate we need more people that can understand and utilize themselves, and understand and utilize the inter - relationships of modern consumer society.
- linking business, entertainment and consumers.
- linking hardware, software and applications.
- linking development, managment, and targets.
And I hope that I have placed Mungkie Associates in the position to do this.
Mesherat Ungkie
CEO Mungkie Soft Inc.
