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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul van Wijk who wrote (12135)	9/30/1999 7:34:00 AM
From: Bipin Prasad	Respond to of 19080

from wsj: Oracle accidentally discloses its 20 largest customers and what they pay ... Facts by fax: Heavy discounting is nothing new in software sales to big corporations. But hard data about the practice have been scarce, at least until Oracle Corp. accidentally faxed an internal document to The Wall Street Journal. The errant fax, sent along with the company's first-quarter earnings release, lists Oracle's 20 largest customers for the fiscal period ended Aug. 31; the revenue Oracle received from each; their payment terms and the discounts each received. Those discounts range from 42% up to 94%, the one-page document shows. Nine customers received discounts of 70% or more; four were listed as greater than 80%. Oracle's biggest customer in the period, perhaps not surprisingly, is listed as computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co., which recently announced a major marketing deal with Oracle. But the 42% discount listed for H-P is less than half the 94% listed for South Korea's Pohang Iron & Steel Co. or the 85% for drug maker Pfizer Inc. Among U.S. agencies, a Department of Defense health affairs unit is listed with a 73% discount, while a mysteriously named Government Customer "G" received 48%, the document shows. An Oracle spokeswoman described the discounts as "standard procedure" in the industry. But the company declined to elaborate further, stating that the document is confidential and was sent as a result of a clerical error. Several industry executives said it is difficult to compare the figures to other companies' discounts, since the document doesn't specify what products were involved. But Richard Finkelstein, a database specialist at Chicago consultancy Performance Computing Inc., said Oracle's sales force may have stretched to keep accounts from going to rival Microsoft Corp. "I would categorize this as extraordinary," he said. InSook