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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric L who wrote (7348)	10/2/1999 3:25:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Eric, It will be interesting to see how the various manuals define the tornado, bowling alley, etc. I'll be taking one or two of the pre-game books on vacation with me soon too. I'll explain my "official" :) start date of the CDMA tornado. If you take a look at the table of growth that I posted earlier today, you'll see my point of reference. Notice the quarter ending in March 1998. There was a 60% decrease in the growth of new subscribers. Because much of the definition of a tornado hinges on accelerating growth, I figured such a dramatic slowing of growth indicated that the product adoption had not yet entered a sustained tornado. Though the winds were certainly whipping around, they were gusts, not sustained storms. Now that we've got additional data, I've had to rethink that. We've now got the data showing that the rate of growth also slowed in the similar quarter a year later. Why? Because that quarter follows the huge holiday-buying quarter ending in December. No wonder the next quarter's growth slows! Ah. But how much did the growth slow this year in the quarter ending in March? Only 21% compared to the 60% drop of a year earlier. Though I viewed all the data with healthy skepticism, that confirms for me that the tornado could not have started as early as March 1998 but was well underway by March 1999. That being the case, in what quarter do I assign the "official" start? I go back to the quarter ending in June, 1998, when the growth was in triple digits compared to the year-earlier quarter. So I use the starting date of that quarter, April 1, 1998. One could argue that that this year we've had two quarters in a row where the sequential growth of new subscribers slowed, that maybe we aren't in the tornado yet. Nah. Take a look at the number of total subs each quarter this year compared to the same quarter in the previous year. The total subs in each quarter are 276%, 195%, 209% and 177% higher than in the year-earlier quarter. In the context of that data that rounds out the growth curve over annual periods instead of putting the microscope on each individual quartter, it's hard to argue that we're not in a full-fledged, sustained tornado of CDMA adoption. Make sense? --Mike Buckley