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Technology Stocks : LSI Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: patrick tang who wrote (20416)	10/24/1999 5:48:00 PM
From: Bob Howarth	Respond to of 25814

IMOH: Short term LSI needs to repair balance sheet. Companies like Altera and Intel have tons of cash no debt while LSI still has a lot of debt. Since this industry is cyclical, debt counts. If I were LSI CFO I would put some shares out there to get this debt off the books. After short term hit, stock could then get higher PE (40 vs 30 according to Wilf). Now is the time for a really good CFO to use equity to get the books in pristine shape.

To: patrick tang who wrote (20416)	10/24/1999 10:23:00 PM
From: DWB	Respond to of 25814

"I think right now that's mostly GMA, with conversion to mostly CDMA probably over the next 2 years. There are two other guys that are in CDMA, MOT and one other, but they only use the chips internally. I think you meant GSM when you typed GMA... The "2" other guys I think you're referring to are MOT and Nokia, who both make chips for their own handsets. MOT was an early CDMA adopter, and can resell their chips, although the user then has to pay QCOM a royalty for the software used on the ASIC. Not a lot of secondary market for the MOT chips to date. In addition, we all know there are some other CDMA ASIC licensee's including Phillips/VLSI (license being renegotiated), INTC/DSP (same thing), and Prarie. You're right that most handset sales are now GSM, but CDMA is growing, and the majority of third generation wireless will be some variant of CDMA (CDMA2000 or WCDMA). The great thing is that when everyone starts moving to third generation, it won't matter, because both GSM and CDMA are converging to CDMA... I don't think LSI has a third generation license (most of the current licenses only cover IS-95 compatible CDMA), and would require a new agreement when third generation technology starts to take over. DWB