Alan Kohler: Is anyone else doing what you do anywhere in the world?
Sam Marks (CEO VIV): In relation to the level of smarts. There is probably one group out of Boston that we look to as a similar sort of business called Digital Lumens. They’ve got some very good technology. They probably sell their business model quite differently to ours. But from technology and savings-wise, probably similar. It’s always hard to know what the competitors are doing. But they are probably the only ones that we would look at as a similar product, that we would compare ourselves to. The rest of the market is really selling what I would consider substitute goods. Which is lights. So yes we can be compared to a light fitting but it doesn’t have the data. It doesn’t have the smarts and won’t get the same savings.
Alan Kohler: So how’s Digital Lumens doing out of Boston?
Sam Marks (CEO VIV): Good. Hard to tell. They are private. They were funded probably 12 or 18 months ago by a round through Goldman Sachs. So the question is when do they go public. But at the moment they are private, so it’s hard to know exactly what they are doing.
Alan Kohler: Are you bumping into them when you look around? I mean are they, I presume they’re only in the US, are they?
Sam Marks (CEO VIV): They’re outside of the US now. We’ve come across them a few times here in Australia. So far we’ve been successful as far as we know on all the times we’ve come up against them but it’s hard to tell.
Alan Kohler: Are there any global businesses that you are working with in Australia that could take you global?
Sam Marks (CEO VIV): There are. I can’t really go into all that detail at the moment. But there is absolutely a number of global businesses we’re working with in Australia. One that we probably can talk about that our commercial businesses we’ve worked with, is a group called Honeywell out of the US. Their businesses upgraded the RMIT site in Melbourne for the Bundoora Campus for lighting. We’ve done some other good projects with them and we’re doing some other projects with them here as we speak and we’re looking at opportunities further afield. There is no shortage of opportunities outside of Australia, but we had to prove it here first.
I think it bodes well if they are beating out US players in competitive tenders. We can only hope that Honeywell (a 100 billion USD market cap company) who are incorporating VIV products into their solutions, make further inroads globally.
VIV right now is being priced as "terrible" by the market, and things merely have to turn out to be simply "okay" for a significant re-rate overall.
If it turns out to be great? You're looking at a Disallowed at least.
We will see from the quarterly in a couple of weeks.
