Here's one from Ha'aretz
How successful is Comverse? (Very)
How successful is Comverse? The rule of thumb says to look at the performance of its stock, the most reliable indicator over time of a company's success.In Comverse's case, the graph of its stock price is most gratifying. Comverse stock is now trading at a value 30 times that of five years ago.
Comverse is truly the crown jewel of Israel's high-tech sector, from the perspectives of growth rate, swelling profits, expanding manpower, and also by virtue of the fact that it has become the world's leader in the field of supplying voice-mail technology to the world's biggest phone companies.
Business Week published a ranking last week of the leading publicly traded companies in the field of Information Technology (IT). IT is a catch-all phrase that, to be frank, covers all the high-tech companies in the world. Comverse is on the list, ranked in decidedly respectable 16th place. For the sake of comparison, star Internet company Yahoo! was ranked 35th, and Intel, leading chip manufacturer, came in 43rd.
Business Week's criteria for rankings were yield on the share over the last year, return on equity, income growth and the total sum of income. Each parameter was weighted equally. America Online, supplier of Internet services, came in first, closely followed by Dell Computer Corp. (which would have been ranked first if the sole criteria was yield for shareholders over the last decade).
Microsoft came in 10th place and Comverse was ranked 16th, right after IBM and before Flextronics. (It should be noted that from the narrow perspective of total income, Comverse was ranked 106th, with $696 million over the last 12 months.)Comverse shares have leaped almost 60 percent in price over the last year, bringing the company's market value to around $5.7 billion. The biggest private shareholder in Comverse, Kobi Alexander, holds 5 percent of the company's stock, which is now worth some $200 million. Lately some Comverse executives, led by Alexander, announced they were selling some of their shares. Alexander alone received $16 million. (Jonathan Nassie
© copyright 1999 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved
|
