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Technology Stocks : JDS Uniphase (JDSU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn McDougall who wrote (3111)	12/17/1999 7:28:00 AM
From: Glenn McDougall	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24042

Shareholders give executives star treatment; Incredible returns guarantee euphoric annual meeting Bert Hill and Karyn Standen The Ottawa Citizen They are gray, balding and definitely middle-aged. They makes jokes with Australian and Slovakian accents. They don't look or sound at all like Nick Carter. But at yesterday's JDS Uniphase Corp. annual meeting at the Chateau Laurier, Kevin Kalkhoven and Jozef Straus, got the full Back Street Boys treatment from delighted shareholders. Take Gilles Legault, chief information officer at CML Emergency Services in Hull, for example. He first bought shares in the former JDS Fitel when it went public in 1996 at the equivalent of about $2 a share. Today his stock is worth millions of dollars. "This is fantastic," Mr. Legault said yesterday. "JDS Uniphase is a great company. The merger of JDS Fitel with Uniphase has produced an outstanding leader in the fibre optic world." Or Robert Montesano, a general contractor, who has seen his 1,000 shares jump by 800 per cent in value in the last 12 months. "I think JDS Uniphase is a tremendous company with great potential. I think it will rival Nortel as far as market value and future growth." David Chow, who works at the National Research Council, said " I was concerned when it fell recently, but I'm holding solid. I think we are only in the initial phase of things that are to come for JDS." Vepe Percival, an administrative assistant at the International Development Research Centre, bought 25 JDS Fitel shares in the spring of 1998 as part of her first venture into investment. "I picked JDS on the advice of a friend. It has been a wonderful investment." A happy shareholder from Vancouver introduced members of the JDS Fan Club on the Yahoo! Finance bulletin board and presented the two top executives with gifts. Of course, the JDS executives know they have fans in the financial world. It's hard not to when your stock has jumped in value by more than 120 times since it was issued at the equivalent of about $2 just three years ago. Big U.S. mutual funds like Fidelity, Putnam, Janus, Oppenheimer and Franklin have loaded up with JDS stock. The cautious stock pickers who run the pension plans of Ontario teachers, California municipal workers and Wisconsin public servants have gotten on board. Even George Soros, the legendary hedge fund investor who has triggered runs on the currencies of some Third World countries, has bought into the company. Many top analysts from across North America were at yesterday's annual meeting scrounging for information they can relay to investors. Many of them appear regularly on U.S. business shows to sing the praises of JDS. The reason? They all think JDS Uniphase has a chance of building the nuts and bolts of the fibre-optic revolution of future decades just as Intel emerged as the supplier of choice to the micro-electronic revolution. JDS staff did a good job of warming up the more than 600 shareholders at the meeting. There were the gifts of Mr. Straus' trademark black wool beret and a picture book of art prepared by the children of JDS employees in Ottawa. A year ago, JDS Fitel shareholders got plastic wind-up toys. This year they found tiny koala bear dolls clinging to the back of chairs. Mr. Kalkhoven and Mr. Straus then put on a show, with Mr. Kalkhoven spinning the vision and Mr. Straus explaining how it will be done. Mr. Straus said JDS alone among all its competitors has the most complete range of fibre-optic products for an expected quadrupling of world sales to $21 billion U.S. by 2003. "After 20 years of growth we are the first company to achieve a sales rate of $1 billion in annual sales in our business and we will be the first $2-billion company." Mr. Straus said the company will run very fast while constantly looking over its shoulder. "We have to be paranoid dreamers if we are to stay ahead of the next wave of technology." He said that customers are demanding new equipment faster all the time. Where once they waited for six months for an expansion of continental bandwidth, now they want it in two weeks. "There is a risk we will mess up. We have no monopoly on smarts." When one nervous investor worried about JDS' ability to manage the fast pace of growth ahead, Mr. Kalkhoven joked that if earnings falter, "I'll blame Joe." Mr. Kalkhoven's look at the company's finances and future was peppered with applause from the audience. Mr. Straus turned what could have been a dry explanation of the company's technology into a standup comedy routine that included jokes at both his and Mr. Kalkhoven's expense. And the two men even managed to educate shareholders on strange science at the heart of JDS, a science which sends telecommunication traffic on tiny pulses of light down thin fibres of glass faster, cheaper and more reliably than anything else on earth. There were parochial questions. An Ottawa investor worried that it may be years before there is another annual meeting here because JDS Uniphase also has a second headquarters in San Jose and operations around the world. Mr. Kalkhoven promised there will be at least one major meeting for shareholders in Ottawa annually.