In The Beltway Orbit: GeoEye

Washington, D.C. – Companies that sell technology to the U.S. government are more attractive to investors if their products have commercial applications as well. Examples we’ve cited recently: Ceradyne and Flir Systems.

Dulles, Va.’s GeoEye is another one in this category and its shares look modestly priced. But be careful–one technical glitch and this satellite imagery stock could fall out of orbit.

GeoEye captures, manages and sells high-resolution satellite imagery, the kind found on Yahoo! Maps or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. The company has $158 million in trailing 12 month sales, a fleet of two satellites and two airplanes, and an archive of imagery covering 300 million square kilometers.

Its next satellite, GeoEye-1, is scheduled to launch sometime later this year. The 4,310-pound spacecraft will make 12 to 13 orbits per day, collecting daily up to 350,000 square kilometers (the size of Texas) worth of color imagery at a 16-inch or 0.41-meters ground resolution. Translated to English, that means that in the images you can see the lines on a parking lot. (No, the satellite can’t parallel park for you.)

But the upcoming launch is a high-stakes event for GeoEye, which only gets one shot to do it right. “After ‘3-2-1-liftoff,’ there’s no chance to go back and fix anything,” says Mark Brender, a GeoEye spokesman and its vice president for marketing.

The consequences of a botched launch? In September 2001, GeoEye’s predecessor company, Orbimage, put up a satellite that failed to make it into orbit. The company filed for bankruptcy in April 2002, and its common shareholders got wiped out.

Full story at Forbes.com

Savvy Savi Thrives Within Lockheed

Washington, D.C. – Savi Technology, an 18-year-old Mountain View, Calif., developer of systems to track cargo and other assets using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, has had so many corporate parents that you almost need one of its chips to track it.

A year ago, Lockheed Martin (nyse: LMT – news – people ) bought the then-private Savi for a reported $400 million. And as Savi co-founder Vikram Verma, who now runs the Savi Group within Lockheed, tells it, the unit seems to have finally found a good home.

At the time of the June 2006 acquisition, Savi had 300 employees and $80 million in revenues. In contrast, Lockheed, a government contracting behemoth headquartered in Bethesda, Md., has 140,000 employees and $39.6 billion in sales.

That raised the possibility that Savi might get lost within Lockheed, as it had in other big corporations. But Savi has brought Lockheed veterans into its operation to both boost its government contracting expertise (its first big defense win was a contract worth $70 million in 1994) and, frankly, to raise its stature within the Lockheed organization, Verma says.

It seems to have worked. At a recent Sanford Bernstein conference, Lockheed Chief Robert Stevens singled out Savi and its business as one of Lockheed’s most promising areas of opportunity for the next five years.

Full story at Forbes.com

Dude, Where’s My Scissor Lift?

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Like the private sector, the U.S. federal government is bullish on technology for keeping better track of stuff. Take the Department of Defense’s supply-chain experimentation with radio frequency identification, or the Federal Aviation Administration’s push to usher in satellite-based air traffic control.

One venture-backed company looking to cash in here: Ekahau. The Saratoga, Calif., outfit, 65 employees strong, sells systems that track goods using wi-fi technology. Wi-fi, for anyone wondering, refers to kind of wireless local access network–the kind you use at Starbucks to surf the Internet on your laptop.

In terms of its business, 15% of which comes from customers in the public sector, Ekahau is targeting physical spaces much bigger than a coffee shop. Example: Hill Air Force Base. Located in northern Utah, Hill employs thousands and is home to seven U.S. Air Force wings. Its Ogden Air Logistics Center does maintenance and overhaul work on hundreds of F-16, A-10 and C-130 aircraft each year, as well as engineering and logistics management for weapons such as the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Air Force has a keen interest in better ways to manage the gear involved in all this upkeep. The faster mechanics get the tools they need, the faster planes get out of the hangar and back into service.

A year ago, Ekahau’s tracking system was chosen for a related pilot project at Hill by Knowledge Based Systems (KBSI), a contractor to the Air Force. The company slapped Ekahau tags (see box image) on scissor and wing lifts, stands, dollies and other equipment relied on by Hill’s repair staff. Ekahau’s software, known as the Ekahau Positioning Engine, managed location information flowing from the tags, as well as laptops and PDAs carried by Hill personnel.

“The pilot went very well,” says Michael Graul, a senior research scientist with Knowledge Based Systems. “We were able to pick up within 15 feet where an item was.”

Full story at Forbes.com

Breaking The Grip On Storage

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, Washington hosts FOSE, a government technology convention that draws 25,000 attendees. Among the 400 companies exhibiting are government contracting giants like Cisco Systems and Motorola.

But the event also has its share of scrappy upstarts looking to gain ground on bigger competitors. Boulder, Colo.’s LeftHand Networks, an information storage concern, is one.

“[FOSE] gives us a great forum,” says LeftHand chief executive William Chambers, 46.

Full Story at Forbes.com

Network Stocks: A View From Washington

For investors with a Washington focus, the business of networks and network gear ought to be an area of interest. Even with budget outlooks getting cloudier, civilian, intelligence and military agencies face unrelenting pressure to improve and secure the way they communicate with data, video and voice.

“A lot of the routed networks out there are kind of long in the tooth,” says Robert Stevens, a vice president at Juniper Networks and the head of its federal government business. “It’s time to upgrade.”

In terms of placing your bets, two competitors stand out here: Juniper and Cisco Systems. Which stock looks more attractive now? The metrics give mixed signals.

In the realm of price-to-earnings ratios, the advantage goes to Cisco. Based on consensus earnings forecasts for the next two fiscal years, Cisco’s P/E multiples are 20 and 17, respectively. Juniper now carries equivalent multiples of 23 and 19.

But Juniper looks cheaper by other measures. Its price-to-book ratio now stands at 1.7, versus 6.0 at Cisco. The stock also looks relatively less expensive according to the price-to-sales, price-to-cash flow (in the sense of net income plus depreciation) and enterprise multiples. The latter is defined as enterprise value (market value plus net debt) divided by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Juniper’s enterprise multiple is just 4.9, versus 14.1 for Cisco.

Given the split decision in the numbers, the investment decision may boil down to a simple choice: incumbent or insurgent?

Full story at Forbes.com

Beltway Bet: Ceradyne

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Thursday, Arlington, Va., investment bank Friedman Billings Ramsey held its annual Washington conference. At the event, execs at some of the biggest names in the defense business–Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, among others–made their case to investors.

Early in his presentation, Ceradyne Vice President Marc King distinguished his employer from the pack. “The majority of what we do today is related to defense,” he said, “however, I want to be perfectly clear, we do not categorize ourselves as a defense company.”

Not a defense company, eh? No, that wouldn’t be perfectly clear to the casual observer of Ceradyne’s business. The Costa Mesa, Calif., company makes high-end ceramics from synthetic materials (as opposed to traditional ceramics, fired from non-metallic minerals like clay). In 2006, nearly three-quarters of Ceradyne’s $663 million revenues came from sales of ceramic body armor to defense customers.

Full story at Forbes.com

Skunk At The Innovation Party

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Every business lobbyist–and politician for that matter–favors spurring technological innovation and advancing American economic competitiveness. So how did a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday, on just those subjects, turn contentious?

Network neutrality crashed the party.

The hearing was called by Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., who in January became chairwoman of the House Committee on Small Business and declared herself a champion for entrepreneurs. But at Wednesday’s hearing, Velázquez and colleagues heard from groups representing big businesses too.

Among the eight trade associations on the witness panel: USTelecom, whose members include AT&T and Verizon Communications, and the American Electronics Association, which counts Apple and Intel among the 2,500 companies on its roster.

There was agreement on most of the items discussed. America needs to produce more engineering and math students. And the Sarbanes-Oxley rules have gone too far.

But then they got around to network neutrality–the matter of whether big Internet service providers should be allowed to charge certain customers, mainly big bandwidth consumers like Google and Yahoo!, extra for access.

Full story at Forbes.com

Smarter Skies

Beijing has 16 million inhabitants, an economy that grew 12% last year and the 2008 Summer Olympics coming to town. If any city needs to let in more planes, it’s this one.

The Chinese are adding a runway to Asia’s second-busiest airport, but officials there also are hoping new technology will free up more space in the skies. In January the Civil Aviation Administration of China struck a deal with ERA, an Alexandria, Va. company, to install 27 devices, each the size of a minifridge, at Beijing International, and 5 more within a 12-mile radius of the airport. The boxes are packed with sensors that can track planes in flight and on the ground, as well as airport vehicles. More frequent and accurate data on the location of aircraft will let the Beijing airport safely cut the distance between planes as they descend.

Full Story at Forbes.com

Beltway Bet: MTC Technologies

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Most of the companies on our 2007 Fast Tech list probably wouldn’t tempt a value-minded contrarian. One of the few exceptions is MTC Technologies, a government technology contractor.
Pick your metric. MTC Technologies is now valued under its $402 million in trailing-12-month sales. Its price-to-earnings ratio, based on consensus forecasts for the coming 12 months, is 17, versus an average of 34 for the Fast Tech 25. Among 20 publicly held companies that specialize in providing tech services to the government, the average price-to-book ratio is 3.3. MTC’s book value multiple? 1.9.

Full story at Forbes.com

Spinning Red Tape Into Gold

WASHINGTON, D.C. – For a D.C.-area private equity shop, Valhalla Partners goes light on the public sector experience. Among these VCs, you won’t find any former cabinet officials or intelligence big wigs looking to trade on a fat Washington rolodex. Nor do they sound all that enthusiastic about investing in companies catering to the federal government or its big contractors.

“Government is capricious,” says Arthur Marks, a Valhalla co-founder and general partner.

Yet there’s no aversion at the Vienna, Va.-based outfit, which has $440 million under management, to making money off opportunities that the government creates, namely through red tape.

Full story at Forbes.com