Glad to hear that life out there agrees with you. My only exposure to the east was Loring Maine and that was waaaay too cold for my liking. Maine is beautiful from Orono south but the rest of the Great White north we should have never allowed into the states. When it snows 6" on the 4th of July, it just isn't American! <gggg>
Not saying I agree or disagree but since you were talking about the fibers, I thought I would paste this article hot off the wire.......
Monday July 24, 6:25 pm Eastern Time
Fiber optic values based on visions, not financials
By Eric Auchard
NEW YORK, July 24 (Reuters) - Put a price on all the tea in China, or the fabled gold of El Dorado, and you'll not be far off the valuation measures investors are giving to fiber optics equipment, the object of the latest stock market buying binge.
In the latest sign of frenzy in fiber optics markets, Canadian communications equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE:NT - news)(Toronto:NT.TO - news) on Monday was reported to be in talks to sell its fiber optic parts unit to Corning Inc. (NYSE:GLW - news), a maker of fiber cables and components, in a deal valued at $100 billion.
The price tag Corning would pay for Nortel's fiber optics business is 100 times greater than the unit's $1 billion in annual revenues. It follows a similarly pricey deal two weeks ago in which JDS Uniphase Inc. (NasdaqNM:JDSU - news), another fiber parts maker, agreed to a deal to buy SDL Inc. (NasdaqNM:SDLI - news) for $41 billion, or 90 times SDL's projected revenues for this year.
Move over consumer Internet stocks: Fiber optics now command the tech sector's loftiest valuations, displacing once sky-high stocks like Yahoo Inc., whose shares trade at a mere 66 times expected 2000 revenue, and eBay, at 38 times revenue.
``All these stories sell during the concept phase and some end up making it, but a lot don't,'' Chuck Hill, director research at First Call/Thomson Financial, a veteran tracker of Wall Street investment trends.
Fiber optics networks deliver communications at the speed of light. They are widely seen as the best hope for meeting exploding unmet demand for raw communications capacity and to unclog the major traffic jams now occurring on the Internet.
Optics have rapidly taken their place among the fabled investment stories of prior decades -- radio in the 1920s, computers in the 1960s, computer peripherals in the 1970s, biotechnology in the 1980s and the Internet in recent years.
``Story stocks get way away from traditional valuation measures,'' Pip Coburn, technology strategist at UBS Warburg, speaking of the speculative underpinnings as opposed to cold financial calculations that propel emerging tech stock themes.
``Then you wake up one day and the story is in question -- B2C and B2B are the latest to fall from fashion -- and the stocks collapse,'' Coburn noted, referring to the terms used to describe business-to-consumer and business-to-business Internet companies. ``When valuation starts to creep into the discussion, these stocks start to go down quickly.''
Fiber optics use fine glass instead of wires to transmit huge volumes of information rapidly via light beams. They refer to the lasers, mirrors and multi-coloured strands of glass cable now hungrily being gobbled up by Internet service providers to delivers communications at the speed of light.
Fiber optics are nothing new. They've existed for decades, with analysts dating the modern fiber-optic era to Corning's development of silica-based glass fibers in the early 1970s and advances in lasers during the 1960s. Optical networks have been around in theory since at least the 1920s.
Telephone and cable TV companies are now ploughing billions of dollars of investment into fiber networks that connect long- distance customers, city regions and even congested office networks, where demand for e-mail storage is exploding.
Nonetheless, the cost of extending fiber optics into residential communication networks capable of reaching millions of homes remains out of reach, despite the tumbling price of optics.
Hill, who worked as a securities analyst following the computer industry until the late 1970s, compared the renewed fascination with fiber optics equipment to stock market bubbles of prior decades.
``In the 1960s, there were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs -- IBM and the seven mainframe computer makers. IBM is one of the only companies still left from those days,'' Hill said.
Most of the remaining seven have disappeared or changed businesses.
Computer time-sharing was all the rage in the early 1970s -- companies with faded names such as Control Data, University Computing and Tymeshare, and which rented out space on mainframe computers to other businesses.
Also bid up then were the computer peripheral makers, many of them now vanished or absorbed into other companies. Many of these traded at more than 100 times annual earnings, Hill recalled.
But even as he warns against such speculative binges, Hill admits to the difficulty of picking the eventual long-term winners and losers among technology stocks -- the Microsofts and Intels and Ciscos of tomorrow.
``We thought that the fiber itself was going to become a commodity years ago, but it's not turned out that way,'' Hill said of the current skyrocketing demand for such products.
Coburn agreed.
``Investors always overestimate what's going to happen in the next one- to two-years and underestimate what's going to happen in the next decade,'' he said, speaking of a five- to ten-year time horizon.
biz.yahoo.com
Just walked in the door and am firing up and it looks like you guys murdered some stocks today. Geesh, DELL back where it was a few months ago again. CSCO back down MSFT, GLW, must be a glass ceiling up there somewhere. <g>
Good Luck,
Lee |
