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

To: Apollo who wrote (13475)	12/29/1999 12:00:00 PM
From: BI*RI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Apollo, I bought TLAB based solely on fundamentals of about 35 straight quarters of record earnings, 35% EPS growth history, a low P/E after the failed merger with Cienna, and 30% projected growth going forward over the next 5 years. From what I can see, their technology is in high demand by the traditional telcos as they move from old-world switches to cross-connects that can marry wired info with optical data. They do mostly switches for telco and cable companies. Sprint, Bell-Atlantic, etc. are big customers. LULU, NT, Alcatel are competitors. They've made a couple of recent acquisitions designed to speed up the process of developing optical data switching applications, but are competing with everyone else trying to do the same thing. They had a special application switch designed for Sprint, but Sprint just backed out. I don't see anything other than a company that is minding it's business, trying to stay current, that's had a business model that's worked very well for them. I don't believe that they are in any of the games covered on this thread. If I see more growth elsewhere in a gorilla or royalty play, I'm looking to make a move. Just won't do so until January when I'm long-term capital gains-wise. GBLX is in the process of laying fiber-optic cables and acquiring land systems so that they can provide data services door-to-door. Their goal is to sell access that will require no switching off their system, so that it is proprietary for them and discrete for the customer. Company X will be able to transmit data from California to their offices and/or customers in New York, Singapore, London, Hong Kong, and Paris without ever leaving the GBLX lines. Additionally, GBLX will lease these lines to to other carriers who will sell the same service to other companies. So that a company like PSInet might lease dark fiber channels from GBLX to sell to their customers. WCOM is a competitor, but they are not global and can't offer the doo-to-door service. They bought out the fleet of vessels from Cable and Wireless that they are using to lay the cables. They will also provide this service to others, as well as be a major seller of maintance services for submarine cables. They are not exclusive in being able to lay submarine cables, as companies such as Tyco are doing it. But they are a major player. They have funding from MSFT and Softbank to develop a fiber optic channel they call their Asia Crossing. Singapore, Japan, etc. are to be linked the same way the U.S. and Europe were recently lit up. Part of the agreement has MSFT committed to purchasing use of the lines for at least five years. In fact, some have speculated that GBLX has much of the intial capacity sold. The MSFT and Softbank funding allows them to get the lines in the water, then it's off to the races. GBLX is also projected to be about a year ahead of the competition in terms of gaining fiber access to these countries. I mention initial capacity, because what they are laying is expandable in terms of bandwidth. More of JDSU's components will just have to be bought to upgrade. <ggg> They also recently entered into an agreement with Hutchinson Wampoa to jointly develop fiberoptic services in Hong Kong and China. These are both submarine and landline right into the buildings, to which Hutchinson has access. Many feel that this agreement gives them a major foot in the door of China that is hard to enter. So far, they have bought two telcos to give them land access. Frontier in the U.S. and Racal in Britain. Frontier gives them the customers as well as telco accesses. Racal is said to have Britain very well covered for the same purposes. Frontier also gave them the web hosting business that has been mentioned frequently here during the discussions of EXDS. They host Yahoo, E-Toys, etc. They have a joint venture with EMC for storage. Former cable exec Hendry (TCI??) who went to AT&T to head up their cable venture, but left over differences in philosophy/opinion as to how it was to be done, is now heading up the Gobal Center web hosting service for GBLX. CEO Annunziata and Hendry have gone on record as to the likelihood that this will be an IPO spin-off in 2000. And that's all I know about that <ggg>. I'm sure any mistaken information I may have will be pointed out by those more knowledgeable than myself. Marc EDIT: Oh yeah, and GBLX just entered into a joint funding venture to pull Nextwave out of bankruptcy. The plum here are the wireless spectrum licenses that Nextwave bought at auction. Nextel is trying an end move at the moment to get them for themselves.