Hiya Chris,
Found your banished piggy too?
Excerpt from TSC.
hio
--
thestreet.com
Sometimes the corporate accountants taketh away.
Don't forget that Compaq's fourth-quarter results excluded a whopping $1.8
billion charge for the writedown of its tanked Internet investments, mainly
CMGI (CMGI:Nasdaq - news). Including that charge, the company lost $672
million, or 39 cents a share.
Compaq's writedown is about $800 million more than Capellas had estimated
on the company's conference call following last month's earnings warning.
Since that time, though, CMGI has plummeted another 35%. Compaq picked
up its stake in CMGI -- a $220 million note and stock equivalent to 41.6
million split-adjusted CMGI shares, some of them preferred -- in June 1999 in
exchange for 82% of its AltaVista unit. At the time the transaction was
announced, those shares were worth about $2 billion. Now, they're worth
about $271 million. It should be noted that Compaq never spent any cash for
its CMGI stake.
CMGI isn't where the charges end, though. In June, Compaq spent $25 million
to buy roughly 1.72 million shares of CMGI's publicly traded, online advertising
subsidiary, Engage (ENGA:Nasdaq - news).
Those shares are now worth about $3.1 million. Compaq also holds shares in
such steadfast tech outfits as divine Interventures (DVIN:Nasdaq - news)
and AskJeeves (ASKJ:Nasdaq - news), down about 86% and 98%,
respectively, from their peaks. |
