Gosh and you think I care enough to actually check before I post ;-)
James..would you please update at the end of the day if we make that buy signal
this old age is getting to me and I may forget to check
this is very interesting for all you that thought Kumar made no comments about Dell that could be construed as negative (ooops..wrong thread)
+Mohan Marette (73488 )
From: +Dell-icious
Wednesday, Oct 21 1998 1:35PM ET
Reply # of 73502
Mohan, this is what Herb Greenberg had to say in his column on thestreet.com:
PC Pitfalls: Of all PC makers, Dell (DELL:Nasdaq) so far has escaped
getting lumped in as headed for trouble by the prophets of doom.
However, that may be changing. Yesterday Piper Jaffray's Ashok Kumar,
fresh from his not-so-glowing comments about Compaq (CPQ:NYSE), told
his firm's sales force that he's getting indications that there has been a
pause in information technology spending by corporations.
He's not the first analyst to issue this warning, but the tone of his comments
was ominous. "What we are hearing is that the sentiment from large and
medium-sized businesses, regarding their commitments, is getting
negative," he told me late yesterday. "Most companies used to go to the
tail end of the quarter and say, 'We'll give you a discount, just take the
units.' MIS managers were obliged to do it. Now that's not happening, and
this is the first quarter that has happened in a long time."
Did Kumar also say, as I had heard, that Dell salesmen aren't making their
quotas so far this quarter? He declined to comment, as did Salomon Smith
Barney analyst Rich Gardner, who reportedly told his customers that he
had picked up a change in tone by Dell's investor relations department.
Kumar made it a point to say that he's not expecting any change in Dell's
current quarter, nor has he downgraded the stock, something that was
widely rumored; rather he thinks this could be an issue for all PC
companies going forward. Compaq's sales have already started to miss
Wall Street estimates. All eyes will be on Gateway's (GTW:NYSE) sales
(not earnings) Thursday, followed by Dell's earnings Nov. 12.
A Dell spokesman sticks by the company's longstanding policy of not
forecasting future results. He reiterated the company's prior comments that
it expects to grow at a multiple of the industry and that the Year 2000
debacle may actually help its sales. |
