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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William Hunt who wrote (10319)	10/19/1999 3:58:00 PM
From: Curtis E. Bemis	Respond to of 21876

Here is something passed to me --from HOOFBEAT-- *****begin snip******** HOOFBEAT 991019 LU NT XXXX LUCENT XXXX The big Lucent fears are starting to come to a head among analysts these days, with a key downgrade yesterday. Lucent is now 30% below it's all time high back in July. Of course, we've known since August that they had trouble with a SAP integration at their Definity and Intuity factories which caused a huge backlog of equipment that was delayed and pushed back. These expenses and lost revenue were expected to shave maybe a penny off of their bottom line, taking away any upside surprise. Is it possible that analysts are just catching on now? Or perhaps other problems are cropping up that we don't yet know about? XXXX NORTEL XXXX Nortel is a solid # 3 in the networking world, behind Cisco and Lucent. Nortel has done extremely well in the last year, tripling over the last 12 months. Nortel has done so well due to an excellent product portfolio in the optical networking solutions market. They are winning a lot of contracts with that division and it has fueled their stock price growth. The massive Bay Networks acquisition last year still hasn't produced target growth rates. Bay was weak prior to the merger and it hasn't gotten strengthened that much post integration. That sheds some light on their ability to execute on large mergers. Especially in a somewhat different industry, Enterprise networking in Bay's case. So they aren't the swiftest at integrating large companies in slightly different businesses. So what does Nortel do now? Overpay for a medium sized acquisition of a company that is even further away from their core business. Nortel is paying about $68/share for Clarify, the # 2 Customer Relationship Management software company (CRM). Current price is $45. Low for the year is about $7. So that's 10 times the bottom price. How well does Clarify's business dovetail with Nortel's Core strengths? There's a weak link there at best. The concern is that the merger integration will take key management focus away from the Core business as they try to wrap themselves around CRM. I'm not opposed to going outside your Core, but you need to display excellence in doing so. This is sort of like Lucent buying PeopleSoft, weird. If you've had a good experience with HOOFBEAT, let a friend know about the 3 month FREE TRIAL! If they decide to subscribe, you'll get a subscription credit for 1/3rd of their subscription period. So feel free to pass on a HOOFBEAT or two, and get credit in the process! Mike Cammarata Standard Contribution $95/2yr or $50/yr or $26/6 months All contributions warmly and sincerely appreciated at: Mike Cammarata PO Box 746 Forked River, NJ 08731 All suggestions, comments, criticisms welcome Anyone wishing to unsubscribe please reply to: mike_cammarata@hotmail.com ********end snip**********

To: William Hunt who wrote (10319)	10/19/1999 4:03:00 PM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21876

William, Knocking out 20k people is the best thing for LU's long term position (if that is what is being planned). there is still a significant amount of fat in the company. Do you think that the cost of a layoff of this size is 100k/person? I am not so sure that investor sentiment is something that McGinn should be paying that much attention to at this point. the bottom line is that he needs to accomplish what he has committed to. Good luck, Brian