Read this presentation from CFO, you got to feel good
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John Connors
Senior Vice President, Finance and Administration; Chief Financial Officer
Microsoft presentation
Banc of America Securities 30th Annual Investment Conference
San Francisco, California
September 18, 2000
CONNORS: Well, thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Visiting San Francisco on a hot day like this, there's one great investment idea I have for the long term, and that's the independent power projects to create electricity for air conditioning.
What I want to talk about today is -- is give you a little look back on Microsoft. As you know, many of you in this room are probably aware we finished our 25th year anniversary on September 5th, and it has been a remarkable 25 years. I think it's more remarkable, the 25 years, how we've changed the lives of people with software technology, and we end our 25 year anniversary with about 400 million customers around the world.
The result of having a large base of customers is that our profits and our revenues have been very healthy for a large number of years. Next year, when we come back, we absolutely plan to have a larger green bar and a larger yellow bar than what is shown here. And what I'll talk about today are some of the things that we're putting in place in order to ensure that our company has strong absolute revenue growth and strong absolute profit growth in such a way that we continue to enrich the 3 million people that hold our shares around the world.
It's been an interesting year for Microsoft, is probably a fair way to describe the last 12 months, and if you look at this chart, we don't feel that great, absolutely, being in the number four position -- this is as of September 1st, and these market caps and PEs have changed a bit since then. In fact, I think they're probably changing as we speak. So from an absolute perspective, we don't feel as good as we otherwise might, but I think, going forward, relatively, looking at Microsoft versus almost any other technology company of the planet, we feel very good about our relative position for increasing shareholder value and moving our PE ratio more in line with where certain of the technology industry leaders are. So we feel very good going forward. |
