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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (31507)	5/4/2000 9:04:00 AM
From: almaxel	Respond to of 64865

Link to Fortune -- SUNW picked in B2B portfolio The Bellwethers fortune.com (clip) If Oracle's specialty is software and IBM is a tech melange, then Sun Microsystems is a good old-fashioned hardware play. Sun's server and storage-equipment units account for more than half of the company's revenue and are Sun's two fastest-growing lines. It isn't hard to figure out why--when you click on any Website, there's a strong chance your computer is communicating with a Sun server, since they power the networks of 10 of the top 12 Internet service providers. What's more, the push toward B2B practices like online procurement is encouraging the world's corporate giants to buy more servers to accommodate their own internal computing needs. Take Enron, which just announced plans to buy 18,000 servers from Sun over the next five years, a deal worth roughly $350 million. Bonanzas like this explain why Sun's most recent results surpassed even the most optimistic Wall Street projections, with profits rising 44% from the same period a year ago. Revenues, too, were remarkably strong, with sales rising 36%, to $4 billion. In a world where many highflying dot-coms have annual revenues of less than $50 million, $4 billion in a single quarter is serious money. And that's no beginner's luck. Sun, after all, has had a winning Net strategy ever since it started spreading the basic language of the Internet, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) back in 1982. Like Oracle, Sun doesn't come cheap--it trades at 76 times next year's earnings estimates--making it a bit more vulnerable than low-multiple stocks like IBM in the event of disappointing earnings. "But what's compelling about Sun is how well it has done under fire," says analyst Andy Neff of Bear Stearns. "You name it--during the Asian crisis, in the Y2K lockdown, Sun didn't miss a beat. And as the company has grown in size, profit growth has accelerated and margins have expanded." Neff, who gives the DiMaggio-like hardware giant his highest rating, says, "Sun develops the initiatives that define where the Internet is heading." Ralf