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Technology Stocks : Vodafone-Airtouch (NYSE: VOD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MrGreenJeans who wrote (2824)	5/30/2000 6:07:00 PM
From: MrGreenJeans	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3175

Veni, Veci, Vodafone Todd Truitt May 30 2000 Vodafone [VOD] reported profits for fiscal 2000 and announced the sale of its Orange Plc unit to France Telecom [FTE] today, driving the stock higher by almost seven percent this morning. We continue to rate Vodafone shares a buy with a target of $65. The company reported net income of 104m pounds, or 0.34 pence per share, compared with a loss of 1.1bn pounds, or 3.64 pence per share, last year (slightly better than expectations). However, net income was not the big story this morning. Instead, the big news was the company?s successful divestiture of Orange Plc - the final hurdle it had to clear for the $166bn Mannesmann merger. Vodafone has not only fulfilled regulator?s wishes by selling the unit to FT, but did so for a fairly attractive price. The company received a 30 percent premium to what Mannesmann paid for Orange originally, equating to a price of $5,980 per year-end Orange customer. Additionally, investors seem to be reacting very bullishly to the success of Vodafone?s wireless Internet efforts. The company reported that it now has more than60,000 WAP customers, and that wireless text messaging traffic increased by more than 900 percent in fiscal 2000 (note: this figure may seem a little inflated due to a small 1999 base). All in all, today?s announcements are extremely bullish for Vodafone shareholders. We continue to rate Vodafone, the largest wireless service provider in the world, a buy as the company continues to aggressively pursue ways to monetize its 40m subscribers (almost twice as many as AOL) through the wireless Internet and other future 2.5 and 3G applications. This and Cable and Wireless [CWP] remain our favorite European telecom ideas