Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Vuzix, Kopin, Microvision

What follows will be simply cutting out all the mentions of microvision from that 10K report.

Chances of this being some kind of "error" are zero.


Vuzix 10K March 2016   "As of March 30, 2016, there were 16,097,951 shares of the registrant’s common stock outstanding."

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In 2010, our previous largest competitor, MyVu, ceased operations. Its intellectual property assets were sold to unnamed parties in Asia. Other companies that have stated their intention to enter this market when their product development is complete are Lumus and Microvision Corporation. At recent CES tradeshows, Lumus demonstrated a see-through HD optics engine in a pair of Video Eyewear. They have not yet announced a product that is production ready. Microvision has also announced that they are currently focused on the Pico projection markets, as described below, and that they are not planning to introduce a wearable display solution. 
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We currently purchase almost all of the microdisplays used in our products from Kopin and Microvision. Our relationship with these microdisplay suppliers is generally on a purchase order basis and neither firm has a contractual obligation to provide adequate supply or acceptable pricing to us on a long-term basis. We procure a small percentage of our microdisplays from other sources such as Syndiant and Texas Instruments. While we do not manufacture our components, we own the tooling that is used to make our custom components with the exception of certain authentication chips and connectors that may be required to support industry standard device connectivity. We believe that we are not dependent on our relationships with any supplier other than Kopin or Microvision. Kopin before we sold the defense divisions had also been a significant customer of our night vision display electronics modules and owns just under 3% of our common stock. Some of our accessory products are sourced from third parties as finished goods. We typically have them print our Vuzix brand name on these products of they are co-branded. Such third party products represented less than 5% of our sales in 2015.

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There are a number of competing providers of microdisplay-based personal display technology, including smart glasses, and we may fail to capture a substantial portion of the personal display market.

In addition to competing with direct view displays, we also compete with microdisplay-based personal display technologies that have been developed by other companies. Our primary personal display competitors include Carl Zeiss, Inc., Sony, Epson, Google, Brother International, 5DT Inc., eMagin Corporation, Oculus VR (Facebook), Kopin Corporation (Kopin), MicroVision, Inc. (Microvision), Lumus Ltd. (Lumus), Kaiser Electro Optics Inc., Toshiba, Garmin, HTC Value, TDG Acquisition Company, LLC, and Accupix of Korea. Oculus, which was purchased by Facebook in March 2014, intends to introduce a very wide field of view head-worn goggle system in spring 2016. Samsung since September 2014 has been shipping a head worn goggle frame, called the Gear VR which allow users to mount their smart phones inside it to create an Oculus content compatible immersive VR system. There are similar smart phone mounting and viewing systems now available from a variety of manufactures ranging from simple ones like the Google Cardboard which can turn most smart phones into a display device to view basic interactive VR content, to more advanced systems similar to the Samsung Gear VR. Numerous other start-up companies have announced their intentions to offer AR smart glass and VR products and developer kits in the near future. In 2015 Razer demonstrated its Open-Source VR Gaming head worn goggle system similar to the Oculus developer kit, and Carl Zeiss demonstrated its VR One, a head worn goggle for existing smart phones with larger direct view screens for VR applications, like the Samsung Gear VR. Further, industry blogs have speculated that companies such as Apple may offer or support VR and AR Video Eyewear products in the near future. In January 2015, Microsoft introduced its Hololens project, a head worn AR smart glass helmet with transparent holographic optics. No pricing, technical details, or formal release date has been released other than developer kits now being available to select developers. Another new company, Magic Leap says it is working on a head-mounted virtual display system for AR applications, however no details have been public regarding its technical capabilities or release date. 

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