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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nbfm who wrote (67347)	2/18/2000 12:03:00 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

The real technology boom: Technology Creates a Permanent Revolution In spite of the painful correction technology stocks have suffered this year, the technology boom is not going away. What we have seen so far is just the beginning. The early visible wealth is being captured by the technology firms themselves. But for every dollar of wealth created in the technology sector, nine dollars will be created by the technology sector. The real benefits of technology accrue not to the tech companies or their owners but to ordinary companies that sell ordinary products and services by improving the quality and lowering the costs of their offerings. There is a price to pay. Technology revolutions make old ways of doing business obsolete. Furthermore, they also make obsolete the people who can't adapt. The headlines are about the dot-com companies, their valuations and their billionaire founders. Technology companies have taken over the commercials on TV, the stock market--except for technology companies the market was down last year--and real estate prices in Seattle, Boston and San Francisco. They have even taken over our language, with words like B2B, portal, download and e-mail. Some aspects of this boom are reminiscent of tulipmania, the silver rush and other speculative episodes of the past. These bubbles take place when people, after seeing other people make a lot of money, convince themselves the train is about to leave without them. They then bid up the prices of whatever is in vogue to ridiculous levels completely detached from the intrinsic value of the asset. But the technology revolution is more than a passing bubble. It will have permanent macro and micro effects. The macro effects are higher growth, more productivity, lower inflation and lower interest rates. The Internet takes the time out of doing business. It makes everything go faster. By definition, this has to raise growth rates. GDP is measured in dollars of business per unit of time. The Internet, by reducing the amount of time it takes to do a dollar of business, allows more dollars of business to take place per hour, day, week, month or year. We measure this as increased productivity and higher growth. For this same reason, it lowers costs and prices, which are essentially measures of how much time a person must work to purchase a good or service. So the Internet also reduces inflation. The real benefits of technology accrue not to tech companies but to ordinary companies selling ordinary products and services. The micro story is less obvious but will have bigger, more permanent effects on our lives. Part of the micro effect is visible. Some tech companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, will be winners; their owners and managers will get rich. The larger part of the micro story is not so obvious. Technology is forcing massive and irreversible changes in the way we all do business. As with every other technological advance in history-- agriculture, printing, railways, automobiles, air travel, electricity, telephones and computers--a few providers (Internet, this time) will make the initial profits, but the lion's share of benefits will accrue to their customers. This will be bad for some companies. In the Internet economy, information is free, time delays are zero and geography is irrelevant. So any business that profits from the ignorance or the slowness or remoteness of others is potentially in serious trouble. This puts distribution companies squarely in the crosshairs of the Internet. More than half the operating assets in the U.S. economy, including cars at dealers' show rooms and sweaters at retail stores, are in distribution. In a world of free, complete and instant information, these are nonearning assets. The tech revolution will do to car lots and retail stores what just-in-time did to inventories in the 1980s--wipe them out. The more layers of middlemen that technology removes from the supply chain, the better selection the customer will get: fresher goods, quicker deliveries and lower prices. With customers buying directly from producers, the only finished-goods inventory required is the box in the back of the FedEx truck on its way to your house. All the rest can go. But as investors found out last Christmas season, someone still has to deliver the stuff after you click the order button. Fulfillment, quality and service are more important than ever. In the Internet economy these intangible benefits are the only points of contact between customer and vendor. This need for high-quality fulfillment will create lots of opportunities for ordinary companies if their owners and managers are flexible enough and fast enough to adapt. Such companies will profit from the technology boom, regardless of stock market valuations for the dot-com outfits. --John Rutledge, Forbes Magazine (http://www.forbes.com/forbesglobal/00/0221/0304047a.htm) glreach.com

To: nbfm who wrote (67347)	2/18/2000 12:11:00 AM
From: Cooters	Respond to of 152472

<<I guess those investors got "snydered.">> How on earth does this man still have a job? Maybe AG is right, good help is REALLY hard to find. Coots

To: nbfm who wrote (67347)	2/18/2000 1:56:00 AM
From: cfoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

H&Q were the lead underwriters for the SAWS secondary offering which priced at 72 about three weeks ago. This would be professionally embarrassing if these people had any sense, or is it conscience. I wouldn't expect them to know what Qualcomm was doing, except Qualcomm has announced often its intention to incorporate more features on their chips, thereby garnering more revenues/profits to themselves while reducing the cost to their customers. This was not a secret and should not have been a surprise to people paid to be close to the industry. Maybe the big fee$ blind people to the obvious.