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

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (8605)	10/21/1999 6:47:00 PM
From: Rick	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

CNBC is going to have a report on "cell phones and Cancer" and its effect on wireless stocks in just a few minutes. Fred

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (8605)	10/21/1999 7:23:00 PM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

I notice that you have included sebl and i2 in the Gorilla category in a number of your posts. Neither has been awarded that title on this thread that I can recall. Are you drawing on some other resource for your classifications (MF or Geoff's)? Revised manual is a must read. It is all in there. Mike posted on this when the revised manual first got in his hands. It is the gorilla game being played out in real time for the authors between the first book up to now. Plus, Geoff has made a couple of significant comments on the Bill Meade list serve with regards to the two stocks. Kippola wrote the chapter in both editions. Siebel In Tom Kippola's Chapter 10 under the heading Updating the Game in the Spring of 1999 you will find this: "1998 was a very interesting year for the CRM marketplace. In early March Siebel Systems announced the acquisition of Scopus, and declared the combined entity - named Siebel Systems - as the leader in the integrated SFA/customer service category. That event forever changed the dynamics of the CRM marketplace. ........ Some gorilla-game investors that we know immediately crowned Siebel the gorilla and as result began selling off their shares in the other vendors. Others played a wait-and-see strategy and held onto a portfolio made up of Siebel and Vantive and/or Clarify. At the time of the acquisition announcement there was nothing to definitively lead a gorilla-game investor to choose one of these strategies over the other. However, over the next two quarters the choice became clearer and clearer." ......much of the woes of Vantive discussed at this point ending with this: "Although Vantive posted a good first quarter in 1998 the wheels appeared to fall off after that. In the second quarter both the EVP of Marketing and CFO resigned. Then in July Vantive posted Q2 financials well below analyst's expectations and the press release blamed poor results on 'execution problems'. Word of mouth in the industry, however, seemed to indicate that Vantive's SFA initiative had underperformed, dragging the whole company down. For pure gorilla-game investors this was probably the last data point required to consolidate the basket around Siebel." Then a few paragraphs as to how the CRM space is adjusting for the Internet with customer-facing and partner-facing CRM categories. "In summary, round one of the integrated SFA/customer service gorilla game is over, and the leader is Siebel Systems." Page 280 of the revised manual under Lessons Learned - "The SFA and customer service categories are converging into an integrated suite called the CRM suite and one company, Siebel Systems, has emerged as the leader in that category." There are a few paragraphs that go on to explain that Oracle and SAP could still enter the space, however their products have been delayed since 1995 and as we know, are yet again pushed out into mid 2000. Toss in Vantive and Clarify being acquired in the past month along with Geoff's comments that I posted on this board a few days ago about the gorillas and chimps going into the Internet partner-facing and customer-facing expansion most likely will be the gorillas and chimps coming out as well. Siebel has accelerated from growth revenues of 89 percent for 1998 to 100+ percent for 1999 thus far. The conference call this week for Siebel was a beautiful thing to listen to - for those of us who own shares of SEBL that is. i2 On page 279 of (revised edition)The Gorilla Game you will find this under the heading of Lessons Learned in Chapter 10 - Case Study 3: CRM Software: "As of this writing an additional tornado is looming in the supply chain management space. i2 is the strongest gorilla candidate, and it is arguably already a gorilla." Here are the recent Q results from i2: ``We achieved record results this quarter,' concluded Mr. Sidhu, ``and now we enter our traditionally strongest quarter. In short, our prospects appear bright.' Net income up 289 percent. Revenues up 53 percent. Record EPS of 12 cents. Revised manual calling them arguably already a gorilla, quarterly numbers seem to be hitting their stride and Moore has commented as well on the list serve along these lines. The above information is why I included them on my list of Gorillas in spite of if the thread has or has not awarded them the title of gorilla. I guess I could have entitled the section they appeared under with a different name. However, I lumped Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, SAP, Gemstar and the two in question all under one category in an effort to distinguish them from the Kings, Prince and Godzillas that I listed. Since the revised manual was written in Q2 of 1999, i2's share price has gone from 17 to 55 while Siebel's has gone from 30 to 94. BB