What remains to be seen is how the gorilla performs over the next 5-10 years, now that it has become established. Only then can we determine how well the Front Office GG performed.
Well, yes and no, because I think a very strong argument can be made that SEBL was never a Gorilla in the first place. Imo, while SEBL is a good choice as the winner of the CRM category, the CRM category never produced a company with Gorilla power. The book clearly states that two of the advantages of the Gorilla are that it can keep costs down and profits up, but SEBL has never had a profitable year of any consequence in its entire existence when applying conservative accounting standards to include stock option expense, and even ignoring stock option expense, it is difficult to argue that SEBL performed close to what we should expect from a company with Gorilla power during its lifetime, especially looking at SEBL performance during the recent downturn. Where are the excess returns from business operations? Where is SEBL's pricing power? Even ignoring stock option expenses, both SEBL's top line and bottom line were absolutely hammered during the downturn and SEBL still reported large losses.
Here is a snapshot comparison of financial performance between SEBL, ORCL, PSFT and SAP over the last year. SEBL's business performance suffered much worse than these others imo.
finance.yahoo.com
And below is SEBL's performance to include stock option expense. Including stock option expense is likely to be something that the FASB will require beginning in late 2004, that is unless Senators flush with SV campaign contributions prevent the FASB from doing their job again like they were able to do in 1993/4.
After Tax
Income
Fisc Yr GAAP Inc. Op Exp w/Op Exp Source
1995 .317 .02 .297 1997 10k
1996 12.9 3.3 9.6 1998 10k
1997 (1.2) 12.7 (13.9) 1998 10K
1998 41.5 41.2 .3 2000 10K
1999 56.5 78.2 (21.7) 2000 10K
2000 123.0 286.0 (163.0) 2002 10K
2001 254.6 807.7 (553.0) 2002 10K
2002 (35.7) 1,046.2 (1,081.9) 2002 10K
Totals, 1995-2002:
After Tax
Income
GAAP Inc. Op Exp w/Op Exp
452 Mill 2.275 Bill (1.823 Bill)
JMO, Huey |
