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Technology Stocks : 8x8 (EGHT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Baker who wrote (813)	1/27/2000 10:37:00 AM
From: Geoff Bennett	Respond to of 1927

Hi Mary, EGHT may appear to be a semiconductor stock, but those chips are used for IP telephony. Even better, EGHT make actual systems from those chips with their own software element (they acquired a French company last year for this). They are not currently in a commodity market...but it's moving that way. Right now I guess that margins are good, and volume is picking up. To give you some idea of the scale of this market, the size of the installed base of telephone gear in the US is about 100 times the size of the Internet market. Outside of the US, it's proportionately much higher (as the rest of the world lags the US in Internet development, but not in telephony). So you can give EGHT the benefit of the doubt in terms of having an Internet-scale PE. Note that the recent equity investment by STM (who are one of the leading set-top box manufacturers) points to the fact that STM would like to see EGHT Voice technology in all of their boxes. This is a pretty big market, and STM are a worldwide player, not just US. EGHT actually have working product, and have established partnerships with leading Telco suppliers. Many of the competing companies in this sector are still pushing slideware. But if you're thinking of buying in, today will be interesting. There's an earnings announcement scheduled for 17:00 EST. With the stock on such high multiples, let's hope the news is good :-) If you buy this morning (Thursday), you'll see that the stock is drifting down as a few lucky folks take profits before the announcement. If you think the news will be good...grab those shares now, 'cos tomorrow we'll be back in the $15 range! If the results are not that good, the stock will tumble tomorrow and there'll be ample opportunity to grab shares. I got in at $4 a while back, and I'm holding on as I believe this is a good long-term proposition, especially as EGHT's technology would fit very nicely into a Cisco, Nortel, Lucent or Marconi portfolio.