They just drew up a list of all the 'buzzword' industries and
claim to be in it.
Well I'm not saying anything that a 100 other people have said, but
anyone who is the least bit familiar with the industries know it's
not so simple.
Biofuels? That a high risk investment. Even of you make the right
bet, it will take another 10-20 years before people get weaned off
oil.
There has been a re-emergence of support for nuclear power
recently. Did the price of uranium shoot up? Not really. Even if
they started planning for the reactors now, it would probably take
another 10 years before the power station goes operational.
IPTV? You gotta be kidding. IPTV requires huge amounts of CAPEX and
generates very little returns. You need to deal with regulatory
bodies. You need to pay for censorship. You need to pay the content
providers. You will face the cable companies who may already have
exclusive content deals locked up.
But wait! Wireless is the answer! We'll use wireless to carry IPTV
so we have low infrastructure costs! Using wireless to deliver IPTV
is still unproven and it still costs a lot to build out your base
stations/cell towers.
The most successful iptv deployment right now is probably PCCW.
They had several advantages including a large, pre-existing
customer base to market to. Singtel is probably trying to follow
that model with Mio. Incumbent telcos and cable operators have
advantages that EmWhatever does not have. Look at Pacific Internet.
Look at Qala. Both of them bought WIMAX spectrum to help overcome
the face that they don't own infrastructure. Has PI launched a
WIMAX service? Qala has launched but do you hear much about it? Why
hasn't Qala launched an IPTV service over WIMAX? Don't you think
they would do it if they thought they could make loads of
money?
Calling card margins are thin and there's pressure from free
services like Skype. Also there are regulatory hurdles. Some
countries don't allow VoIP service. Those that do require a license
which raises your costs.
They claim that EmBeyond provides, among other things, a complete
range of consultancy and provisioning service to Hotel
Managers/Developers. Hotel chains are very picky about who they
work with. Hospitality is a very niche market with a few
specialized players. Micros Fidelio pretty much owns the market for
Property Management Systems. HIS is like AMD to Micros' Intel. Then
there are the specialized HSIA/DVoD/In-room Entertainment players
like Maginet, Guest-tek, Lodgenet. Financing these projects is
another big challenge.
Even if they had the expertise in all the industries they claim to
be in, would customers be willing to buy products and services from
them? They need to prove themselves and that won't be easy. It
means doing deals that lose money at the beginning to gain market
share. It means paying top dollar to pull expertise from
established companies. It means a big cash drain.
