With 1.04 billion shares outstanding and a stock price consistently going through all-time highs (currently around $140) a round lot is now around $14,000. At these rarefied heights, a stock like EMC is judged on revenues and earnings growth, in percentage terms and in absolute terms. I doubt a stock split will have the trading effect that a stock split would typically have for a stock with a capitalization of under $25B or even $50B. The exceptional fundamental story remains the same and continued references to EMC as a storage hardware company can only mean there is probably untapped demand as EMC Software (TTM revenues = $822M) becomes a larger part ($1.5B to $2B) of a business going from under $6B to about $12B in revenues by the end of 2001.
Interestingly enough, the continued success of IBM in scooping up all those multi-year, multi-billion technology service contracts abroad, particularly in Europe and Japan, may do more to cast the spotlight on EMC's core strength -- hardware+software=system architecture -- than any EMC advertising program.
As you know, one of the upsides for IBM in those multi-year, multi-billion contracts is correlated to the way IBM can make its costs go down faster over time. Guess what? The best way to make that happen is to adopt the storage-centric system architecture that EMC has mastered and has been selling for a long time. That, of course, eventually makes IBM the most formidable long-term competitor to EMC. But until then, Shark with missing teeth in the water!!! <g>
Gus
Note: Once EMC reaches $12B in revenues, it can grow at ONLY 20% annually -- less than its 25% annual guidance -- and STILL achieve $30B in revenues in ONLY 5 years. Corporate storage requirements are growing at more than 100% annually and that rate will probably accelerate as the effective throughput of the networks increase over time. |
