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Technology Stocks : Nortel Networks (NT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (3740)	11/10/1999 3:51:00 PM
From: Paul Lee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14638

Nortel reveals few surprises to investors By Lydia Zajc NEW YORK, (Reuters) - Nortel Networks Corp. , one of the world's biggest communications gear makers, uncloaked few surprises at this year's investor conference Wednesday -- a far cry from last year's debacle that caused a severe pummeling of its stock. The international giant, based in Brampton, Ontario, held its annual conference for analysts and fund managers in New York for the second year in a row. But this year the strategy had changed. Last year Nortel's former chief financial officer, Wes Scott, sent analysts scrambling for their cell phones after announcing that revenues in the fourth quarter would soften from previous predictions although bottom-line profit would remain firm. This year a steady stream of positive developments were discussed by the company's top executives, including the possibility of outsourcing more work and plans to get customers to pay up faster in fiscal 2000. Chief Executive John Roth told the conference that Nortel would move to eliminate some redundancies and duplications over the next few months in general and administration support areas. The company, now in a three-year restructuring program, has begun to contract out the manufacture of some components. Nortel also hopes to see its enterprise sector, mostly made up of efforts to make data flow more smoothly over phone lines, grow about 10 percent in fiscal 2000, or about half of the company's overall predicted growth of 20-21 percent. During the half-day session at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Roth joked about last year's meeting. As he took the platform he remarked that analysts, unlike last year, hadn't rushed to their cell phones by the end of the morning. Last year Nortel's stock tumbled on the day of the conference and plunged for days afterward because analysts downgraded the company's rating or outlooks. Its stock Wednesday charted gains instead. Nortel shares were up C$2.60 to C$103 on the Toronto Stock Exchange late Wednesday. Chief Financial Officer Frank Dunn added Wednesday that the firm planned to get customers to pay up faster in fiscal 2000. Dunn said he anticipated that the drop in days of sales outstanding from 1999 would be closer to 80 days for short-term receivables. The indicator, which measures the average delay between sale and payment, currently stands at 115 days. Dunn vowed that his job was to make sure ''the only surprise will be positive surprises going forward.'' Roth noted that the company's South American sales could pick up once the battered continent's economy did. Roth also mulled the possibility that major investor BCE Inc. , which holds about 40 percent of Nortel's shares, has discussed ways of selling its stake without hurting Nortel. ($1-C$1.47) 15:47 11-10-99

To: The Phoenix who wrote (3740)	11/11/1999 10:56:00 PM
From: telecomguy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14638

Gary, you must be a propeller head (& I say that partly as a compliment but also partly as a criticism!). No one is saying that a multi-purpose hardware platform is going to outperform a dedicated machine! What we are saying (remember John Lennon?!!!) is that a routing functionality built into a multi-purpose hardware platform provides GOOD ENOUGH routing capability for the non-mission critical and non-fortune 100 companies who want to save 50% on purchasing their routers........in other words, what Nortel is doing is to create a developement environment where you will see a plethora of routers being developed on all kinds of "edge" appliances (cell phone, PC, fax machines, laptops, palmtops, set-tops, TV's, Sony playstation, etc.etc.) with some specializing in very basic routing capability at $500 a unit to go after the Small business market and some others developing niche vertical/horizontal and custom router applications. Once the Genie is unleashed, products will follow and Cisco will be affected -- not in their current enterprise market but rest of the remaining small/mid size market. So this is a pre-emptive move by Nortel to prevent Cisco from gaining 70% monopoly market share on the next wave of IP adopters. Without the new growth from this smaller market segment, Cisco cannot continue to expand & justify their share valuation which they have been using to "buy" into the Carrier Class network equipment market (fortunately for Nortel & Lucent, it takes more than a product to win contracts from PTT's like implementation capability & even understanding how to deal with the beaurcracy/politics/foreign culture/relationship of PTT's from diverse markets around the world. Nortel is attempting to cut this 900 pound data gorilla to size so they can't use funny money (stock) to push their way into the Public Network market.........and eventually in the long-term, true intelligence will likely reside in the Network as they become more sophisticated and complex. In the long-run, router makers like Crisco will possibly go the way of specialized, proprietary technology companies like Wang, Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, Novell, etc.etc. brought down to their knees by standards based network players. In that scenario, either Cisco becomes a custom router player or they have to sell to the PSTN network service providers! It will be an interesting fight however.......like the upcoming Holyfield Lewis bout.