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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Anonymous who wrote (16626)	10/10/2000 5:41:54 PM
From: Gottfried	Respond to of 21876

Anon, back in '93 I didn't follow things, so I don't remember anything about warnings. I seem to remember that one year they lost 7 or 8 billion. I'll check to see if I find anything and if I do will pm. Gottfried

To: Anonymous who wrote (16626)	10/10/2000 11:57:25 PM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21876

Anon - IBM basically went downhill for a couple of years, from the late 1980's till 1993. Employment at the company went from a peak of 405,000 in 1985 as I recall to a low of around 215,000 in 1993-1994. They kept cutting costs/people in dribs and drabs during the late 1980's, and kept going downhill. With the stock down to around 40/share (10 bucks a share today since there have been two splits), Gerstner was brought in and John Akers 'retired'... Gerstner applied the financial medicine one final time via a huge writeoff of around 8 billion, and laid off a bunch more folks. 40 bucks turned out to be the bottom in 1993 and over the next 6 years the stock was a 10 bagger. IBM however, never showed strong growth during the Gerstner era (except in services), and has really been a cost cutting/financial engineering story. They did have a strong run however, but the stock hit the wall at 140 a year or so ago and has been treading water since. Hope this helps, John