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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (85779)	7/15/1999 12:18:00 PM
From: Tom Chwojko-Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

This may be a silly question, but, why should he? If one is a long term stock holder, what difference does the short term fluctuation make in one's portfolio? I really don't care if Intel is at 50 or 80 before, during, or after earnings come out. I do care how the company fares years from now, and by then the numbers and any guidance that went with them will have been history. If one is a short term stock holder, day-trader, etc. why should he care one whit? At best (if he's accurate) he can smooth the stock graph, at worst, he could be accused of manipulating things (if something goes wrong).

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (85779)	7/15/1999 12:53:00 PM
From: Haim Barad	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

That was great!!! I completely agree!!! Haim

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (85779)	7/15/1999 1:54:00 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Uh Mary, uh, bad hair day? To recommend to a reporting company that they intentionally mislead, high or low, is sort of like, well, uh ............FRAUD. :) Duke

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (85779)	7/15/1999 6:05:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 186894

Mary you sure make it sound easy. And it would be easy if the customer orders and revenue's were predictable as in the pre BTO Era [ pre Build To Order era] . I am sure that Intel is disciplined enough and does a good job of predicting expense. And in a past era customers would place orders months in advance making it possible to predict revenue as well. Thus the uncertainty for the next quarter was manageable. With the Build to Order world your visibility is only a few weeks at best. This makes it very rough to predict a quarter in advance and you are heavily dependent upon your sales forecasting ability. Q3 is the hardest to forecast. A very large percentage of the Q3 shipments happen in the last two weeks in preparation for Christmas. A slight change in the Christmas ramp rate and most of the forecasted shipments will end up in Q4. I find that the Intel forecast and guidance are an order of magnitude better than the rest of the chip and PC industry. I depend upon the Intel forecast for estimating the health of the entire Chip business. The best example is Q1 98. In late February 98 Intel warned of inventory accumulation at PC manufacturers. A day later Compaq owned up to inventory accumulation. IBM and HP acknowledged their inventory accumulation problems four weeks later. It showed that Intel had a better handle on its customers business than the customers themselves did. The rest of the Chip business ability to forecast sales is even worse, and suddenly sheer panic overtook the chip business in June 98. However the Communications chips are a safer one to forecast, since the telecommunication companies have longer and easily predictable purchase patterns. And I forgot that chip costs are not exactly predictable either. When your yield is improving rapidly a slight advance or delay in the forecasted yield improvement has a dramatic swing on the P&L. Chip capacity planning one of the most challenging jobs on the planet, and no one has done a good job long term. That is why the chip business goes through violent cycles of under and over capacity.