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Technology Stocks : COM21 (CMTO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (2062)	4/13/2000 5:22:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2347

Need help. Been timed out every time I log in to the webcast, commentary please. Thanks in advance. Top Line growth!! WOW. No company I have invested in has delivered what COM21 just has! The ONLY thing the street ultimately cares about is this. Any UPGRADES coming our way? Margins? Are they improving? Any trouble here? New products? Any mention of set tops? Guidance for next Q? The old visibility thing? If these hurdles can be cleared than 100/share is possible this yr.? PS Some of the folks in on the call will have been in on the TERN call. If we can show that CMTO can do biz with the street, will there be some intangible benefit?

To: J Fieb who wrote (2062)	4/13/2000 8:38:00 PM
From: Kerry Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2347

Great quarter by CMTO. Congrats to CMTO mgmt and employees. I did not have a chance to listen to the conference call but I would like to share my preliminary thoughts anyways without having the benefit of listening to the Q&A: 1.It is unfortunate from a short term perspective that the Naz is still in a corrective phase/bear market but it also allows long term investors to accumulate more shares cheap. 2. IMO, there are 2 factors preventing CMTO from attaining more fair valuation. Low gross margins ( I see that 30% level has held for at least past 2-3 quarters ) and Wall St major brokerage support/coverage. For example BRCD the leading Fibre Channel switch vendor achieved revenues of $43 million their last quarter versus $30 million the prior quarter. The revs and sequential quarterly growth is almost identical to BRCD, yet BRCD commands a $13 BILLION market cap ( their stock has split twice since they IPO'ed 11 months ago )versus CMTO puny market cap of $600-700 million. The major difference is that BRCD is perceived as a dominant player in its market, has 50-60% gross margins and has the backing of virtually all the major brokerages. This brings me to my questions that I hope some people can answer over the course of the next 1-3 weeks: What is a realistic/ doable gross margin expectation for CMTO in the next 6-12 months? What are the key drivers to improving margins? Higher Price or Lower Cost? Are we talking about volume or savings on specific components? Are cable modems perceived merely as low margin commodity items in a highly price sensitive , fragmented market ( versus more value-added networking technologies like FC/GE )? Is this preventing higher market valuations? Besides the traditional PE and PSR that Wall St uses to set price targets, what companies are the analysts using for their "Peer Group" valuation models? Do the analysts compare CMTO to TERN, ORCTF, AWRE or are there other companies to compare valuations with? Thanks for sharing any relevent CMTO info. I see from the SI boards that Anthony@Pacific ( who is about to be sentenced soon for mail fraud ) and the short herd have gone full out to attack TERN. Hatred of TERN makes strange bedfellows indeed.