The sell notes that have had Ferranti International Signal Plc shares moving in the opposite direction to most of the rest of the market look like the worst kind of knee-jerk short-termism: the argument is that the company, which is not flush with cash, will have to make major investments to get its Phonezone Telepoint service up and running and will see no return from it for at least a couple of years, but two contra arguments are equally strong – the first is that the shares cannot fall far without reviving bid speculation in the year that almost everyone agrees will finally see a fundamental restructuring of the UK if not European electronics sector, the second is that there must be mileage in hyping Phonepoint to Americans who place vast valuations on tiny loss-making cellular phone companies as potentially a market at least equivalent to cellular – and in Phonepoint, of the four winning groups, Ferranti is by fat the purest play (in other words, buy on weakness!).
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