transport of delight

Transport of delight
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Keeping kids safely strapped in on the buses and making money - what more could we ask from our latest techno-punt.
No child in the bush should travel on the school bus without a seat belt under a scheme Prime Minister John Howard announced last week. The government would spend $40m over four years to strap in the kiddies of rural Australia.

It's not as ambitious as Bob Hawke's unfulfilled pledge of two decades ago that no child would live in poverty, but it may add some excitement to investors in TZ, an Australian-owned and American-based technology company in which we doubled our holding a week ago.

Readers of last week's column will recall that TZ holds world patents over intelligent fastening systems, where fasteners embedded with microprocessors enable remote locking and unlocking of complex components on assembly lines and building sites.

We added another 2000 TZ to the portfolio holding at $2.45 - late last week the shares surged to as high as $3.42, giving the company a market capitalisation for its 38.7 million shares of $132m.

Although last week's column mentioned TZ was collaborating with such majors as BAE Systems, Boeing, Airbus and leading auto component makers, we didn't have enough space to reveal the company's impending school bus deal.

TZ has been working on a joint development with Navistar, a company that claims to build 80% of school buses in the US, or 38,000 buses a year. Under the expected deal, TZ's Intevia's technology would supply the seatbelts and fittings, including an electronics system that would tell the driver if any passenger was not belted in and would automatically unbuckle after a crash.

According to TZ director Andrew Sigalla, with 112 seatbelts to be installed on each bus, the company would make a gross margin of $US60 a seat. This is but one of 22 production developments approaching completion. So far, five American states have l-egislated to make seat belts compulsory on school buses, including the most populous, California.