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

To: P.M.Freedman who wrote (5286)	10/27/1999 9:23:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

P.M., good news! Whichever way you look at it, WCOM would get the contract: The brief announcement said that the contract was solicited on the Internet, was reviewed by approximately 175 companies and that two bids were received. Defense officials refused to name the other bidder, but published reports have said it was Sprint Corp (FON).

To: P.M.Freedman who wrote (5286)	10/27/1999 9:30:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 11568

Sprint could have been a contender. Instead, it's selling out. Epitaph for a Great Brand By Scott Woolley Forbes Magazine November 1, 1999 NOT LONG AGO WILLIAM ESREY had grand dreams. They centered on a Kansas City, Mo. suburb where the Sprint chief executive was building what he bragged would be the biggest corporate campus in the world. The 240-acre park would have room for 14,500 employees, two waterfalls, eight acres of natural wetlands and a glassed-in winter garden. It would be Sprint's base and Esrey's seat of power. Not anymore. When MCI Worldcom acquires Sprint, Esrey will be titular chairman, but Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers will run the show--from Clinton, Miss. The merged behemoth will be known as Worldcom--sans MCI, sans Sprint. Esrey will work from Missouri; it's unclear what Ebbers will do with the campus. It's not a sure bet the Sprint name will even survive. Sprint spent $2 billion on ads this decade, $735 million in the past two years alone, Competitive Media Reporting says. But Worldcom hasn't decided how to support its three brands. Given Ebbers' vow to cut $3 billion in annual expenses in a few years, huge ad budgets for Sprint are probably a thing of the past. Worldcom's sky-high stock used to "bug the hell" out of Esrey. Soon he'll own a lot of the stuff. As Sprint fades, its investors aren't griping --their stock has risen fourfold in five years. Yet chief executives have a genetic need to run their own shows and control their firms' destinies. Selling out to Worldcom is a personal capitulation by Bill Esrey, after 20 years at Sprint--15 years as chief executive. Esrey was a former investment banker who had an inability to charm Wall Street. Ebbers has no such problems. He touts Worldcom as a growth play deserving a princely premium. Sprint struggled to get a price-to-earnings multiple of 28; MCI Worldcom's multiple was double that at times. A year ago that discrepancy struck Esrey as grossly unfair. "It bugs the hell out of me," he said at the time. Yet he was able to do little about it. He tried to merge Sprint with EDS in 1994, but the deal unraveled over control issues. He boldly sold 10% stakes to telecom giants in France and Germany, but their joint venture went nowhere. His tracking stock for Sprint's wireless business soared, but it wasn't powerful enough to buy him a critical mass of global telecom assets. Esrey made plenty of astute moves over the years. He launched the nation's first fiber-optic network, made a smart early bet on digital technology for cell phones and built a beloved consumer brand. Now his legacy is waning. And so it is that Sprint, which grew from a local phone company in Abilene, Kans. into one of the Big Three, passed away last month. It had just turned 100. forbes.com:80/forbes/99/1101/6411064a.htm