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

To: tekboy who wrote (7838)	10/8/1999 1:58:00 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

For those interested in King JDSU (lifted from the JDSU thread) TheStreet.com Oct 6, 1999 JDS Uniphase Eyes Acquisitions in Optical Technology Industry By Kevin Petrie Staff Reporter SAN FRANCISCO -- Hustling to keep the lead in the fast-moving optical network industry, JDS Uniphase (Nasdaq:JDSU) is using its powerful stock currency to acquire new technologies. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based supplier of optical-fiber network instruments said it would purchase Epitaxx in a stock swap valued at $400 million. While hardly a big chunk of JDS Uniphase's $21.7 billion market cap, the transaction offers insight into the company's growth strategy. JDS Uniphase said Epitaxx will add only about 5% to its revenue, which totaled $282.8 million in the year through June. But Epitaxx's equipment for testing the flow of light through glass will fit snugly with JDS Uniphase's current offerings. Expect more deals like this, says Kevin Kalkhoven, CEO of JDS Uniphase. The company will keep bolstering both its engineering talent and its offerings for customers, such as network suppliers Alcatel (NYSE:ALA) and Ciena (Nasdaq:CIEN). The aim: Buy the best before anyone else gets there and become the broadest merchant supplier of optical components around. "Nothing is off the table," Kalkhoven says of potential acquisitions. He wouldn't talk about specific acquisition plans, but he's eyeing the 40 to 50 optical start-ups operating worldwide as well as his publicly traded peers. The fast-growing optical-component industry is rapidly consolidating as companies strive to achieve economies of scale. And JDS Uniphase is in the strongest position to cherry-pick the best acquisitions. Following the July merger of JDS and Uniphase, the company is the biggest in its niche. The stock of the combined companies has risen tenfold since early 1997. And it raised $600 million in a stock offering just weeks after the merger closed. The strategy has investors ferreting around for the next targets. JDS Uniphase's announcement Monday sent its stock up 8% to a record close of 125. The stocks of its smaller peers SDL (Nasdaq:SDLI) and E-Tek (Nasdaq:ETEK) jumped 5 5/8 to 82 3/4 and 3 3/16 to 56, respectively. "They ought to be sending me flowers," jokes Kalkhoven. "Every time we do a deal, their stocks go up." JDS Uniphase excels at hiring and acquiring brainpower, says Mark Graf, who heads up North American business development for optical supplier Altitun of Sweden. Graf wouldn't say whether JDS Uniphase might want to buy his company, but he sees the advantage of linking with a more established company. "It would be very difficult to do it alone." Analysts agree that the smaller fry will get eaten up. "You can't play small," says analyst Chris Crespi with Banc of America Securities, which has acted as investment banker for JDS Uniphase. He rates JDS Uniphase at buy. Epitaxx itself balked at going it alone, abandoning its plans to issue public stock in spring 1998. Who's next for JDS Uniphase? According to an equity analyst who asked not to be named, the company might benefit from snapping up CoreTek, a developer of network lasers in Wilmington, Mass., that received $6 million in funding in February from Adams Capital Management and other backers. Another candidate is Lasertron, a unit of Oak Industries (NYSE:OAK) in Waltham, Mass., even though it recently lost business and prompted Oak to preannounce disappointing results for the September quarter. Officials at CoreTek and Oak didn't immediately return calls for comment. Kalkhoven says cagily that those companies, as well as Altitun, are "in the right area." And he's got all that money to spend.

To: tekboy who wrote (7838)	10/8/1999 2:03:00 AM
From: Sommers	Respond to of 54805

Tek, you remind me of a lawyer I used to work with. Nice guy. Laid back, thoughtful and humorous. Thought would enjoy reading Geoffrey Moore's article "When Private Goes Public" on page 115 of Forbes ASAP (10/4/99). <<couldn't help noticing that the greatest number of ads was for cellular phones>> Then you've gotta love this site: www.tekboy.com/gobraingo --Sommers

To: tekboy who wrote (7838)	10/8/1999 4:07:00 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

A must read from Fortune entitled Next up for Cell Phones: Weaving a Wireless Web. pathfinder.com Goodies about Nokia, GSM, 3G, Qualcomm/Microsoft and the future of our investment. Third, try as I might I couldn't get her to shed her Ericsson holding, so if her account stumbles it's her own fault! (She's currently writing her second book on Swedish social democracy, and thus considers the very thought of selling her ERICY a near-treasonous act--even after I told her how they behaved toward the Q!) Tekboy, have your wife read the article. Section 4 of the article is entitled A Swedish Model Gone Wrong. BB

To: tekboy who wrote (7838)	10/8/1999 8:57:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Lesson number 1 of investing: Don't fall in love with a stock. Tell your Mrs. tekboy (tekgirl?) that studying/liking a nation is not a bullish indicator of a stock. RE: SNDK, StockHawk's description of SNDK caused an uneasiness in my old bones. What he described was a royalty fight in that market, with marketshare dominance non-existent. My conclusion was that there is no gorilla game there. Anyone else have an impression?

To: tekboy who wrote (7838)	10/8/1999 2:05:00 PM
From: Rickus123	Respond to of 54805

tekboy... RE: Any SNDK holders (bullish or bearish) care to comment? if you've been poking around on the SNDK thread, you have probably already seen this, but it bears mentioning here: go2net.newsalert.com U.S. Army Awards Multi-Million Dollar Contract to Kaneb Technology Unit to Buy More Than Two Million SanDisk PICs Over 5 Years to Store Medical Data for Soldiers; The SanDisk PIC Is Also Targeted At The General Health Care Market For The Capture And Storage Of Civilian Medical Records Eli Harari, SanDisk's president and CEO, said, "The PIC represents an exciting new market for SanDisk with immense potential in the storage of personal information. This broad market includes military agencies, government departments and health care companies worldwide. SanDisk intends to aggressively promote the PIC to hospitals, HMOs, university medical centers, clinics, nursing homes, insurance companies and numerous other entities involved in the health care field. We are pleased to have a marketing agreement with Kaneb's subsidiary, InformaTech Inc., to address market opportunities in the military and government sectors and various other vertical markets such as telemedicine." The PIC is a key enabling technology within the DoD's presidentially-mandated Force Health Protection Program. The PIC is intended to fill the data gap identified during the Persian Gulf War in which the past medical data of service personnel was not always available on the battlefield. In the paper-based system, treatments and exposures during field operations were not consistently documented. Incomplete and non-electronic repositories of medical data after deployment hindered data collection for population-based medical analysis. This complicated investigations into the Persian Gulf illness, according to the DoD. While Orwell may be cringing somewhere, the possibilities seem pretty huge. It's not unrealistic to think that the military's adoption of this technology could help create a de-facto standard.