John/qveauriche:
Methinks that might be an employee insider indication worth keeping an eye on. There are almost 56 million in the money employee/director/officer options that are exercisable right now, but which have not been exercised. These break down as follows:
Range of Options Exercisable
Exercise Prices # of Shares Wtd. Avg. Ex. Price
$0.02 to $3.39 8,893 $ 2.94
$3.43 to $6.21 28,220 $ 4.95
$6.25 to $8.01 15,399 $ 7.09
$8.02 to $19.25 3,196 $ 14.04
Why so many unexercised options that would clearly be profitable to exercise right now with the shares selling at $35 or so? I would guess these are options that have vested since the last opportunity to take advantage of a high stock price in 1999, i.e they couldn't be exercised then, but can be now.
I note from the most recent 10K and proxy that in FY1998, options to purchase 49 million shares were exercised, plus an additional 5 million shares were purchased through the employee stock purchase plan. In contrast, in FY2000, only 22 million options were exercised, and only around 750k shares purchased, and in FY2001, only around 15 million options exercised and 760k shares purchased. There are other possible explanations for this of course, but one possibility is that in 1998, the employees knew that good news, a profitable year, and a run up in the stock were all coming.
So maybe these profitable options are sitting unexercised because their owners are confident of the upcoming year or so and know that they will be able to exercise and sell at a much higher price in the near future than they can right now?
Or maybe they hold the same ideological views as John, and are not exercising their options on principle, because they don't want to impose their cost on the shareholders? (<vbg>)
David T. |
