I agree with Anthony Ho. PictureTel is absolutely a good buy at this price. The confusion in the market is that Intel's MMX stuff will drive PictureTel out of business. This is really ignorant. The MMX stuff is still very primitiveis and is far from being any real threat
to PictureTel's core business, business-oriented group video
conferencing systems. To achieve similar video and audio quality, it will take MMX at least another 3 or 4 years. So at least for a few years, group systems are not going to be affected by Intel and are still going to make a lot of money for PictureTel.
Another confusion in the market comes from those so-called internet video phones. Some people has unrealistic expectations, never really understand the issues of variable bandwidth, loss of packets, traffic jams in the internet environment. Anybody who has used any of the internet video phones knows that these products are just toys. I doubt the video quality will ever be good enough for business use (unless there are dramatical changes in the internet protocols and structures maybe 5 years from now). Meanwhile, in the dedicated corporate intranet environments, video conferencing is very promising. And guess what, PictureTel is the world leader in this category.
At PE ratio of less than 11, PictureTel is definitely a good buy. The worst is over, PictureTel can NOT drop anymore. On a 1-10 scale (10 to buy), I give PictureTel 11.
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