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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Boplicity who wrote (24054)	12/11/2000 12:14:21 PM
From: horsegirl48	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Any feelings about your old friend Dell or aol? Aol and twx deal Thursday, and dell seems to have bottomed? HG48

To: Boplicity who wrote (24054)	12/11/2000 12:51:38 PM
From: Venkie	Respond to of 65232

Forbes.com Top Tech Execs: Henry Nicholas By David Einstein Tall, slim and strong, Broadcom Chief Executive Henry Nicholas could easily be mistaken for a professional basketball player. And if he were one, he'd probably be known for his playmaking skills. With the court wizardry of a Jason Kidd, Nicholas sees the game unfold and always makes the business equivalent of the right pass or the perfect shot. Which explains why he has been able to grow Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM - news) into one of the most successful chip companies in the world. Nicholas, 41, is a 6-foot-6, hard-driving exec who lifts weights, gets by on just a few hours sleep and has one thing in mind--to make his company the ``end-to-end'' leader in broadband communications. And he's well on the way. Broadcom chips today can be found in most set-top boxes and cable modems, and the company has made heavy inroads in corporate networking, home networking, digital subscriber lines and wireless. Four years ago, Nicholas decided that, ``Our goal was to provide solutions for every single market that involved broadband communications. We bucked conventional wisdom that says you should focus on a single market, and instead engaged in multiple markets simultaneously.'' One of the highlights of this year, says Nicholas, ``has been seeing that strategy come to fruition.'' Fruition is an understatement. Broadcom's revenue has soared from $6.1 million in 1995 to $518.2 million in 1999. For the first nine months of 2000, they were $756 million, putting the company on target to top $1 billion for the year. And the sequential quarterly growth for this year is just as staggering: from sales of $191.6 million in the first quarter to $245.2 million in the second quarter and $319.2 million in the third quarter. Nicholas co-founded Broadcom in 1991 with Henry Samueli, who had been his engineering professor at University of California, Los Angeles. The pair held off taking the company public until April 1998, by which time Wall Street was chomping at the bit to get a piece of it. In its first day of trading, the stock hit $70.00, nearly triple its $24.00 offer price. By the end of 1998, Broadcom shares were at $120.75. Throughout 1999, and for much of this year, the stock continued to climb, reaching a peak of nearly $275 last summer--and that's after two 2-for-1 splits. It's backed off recently--along with just about every other tech issue--and is currently trading at around $125. The blockbuster IPO created a couple hundred instant millionaires in the Broadcom workforce, and made billionaires of Nicholas and Samueli, each of whom owns about 22% of the common stock. The most recent Forbes list of Richest Americans put them in eighteenth place at $10 billion each. Broadcom's stratospheric stock has enabled Nicholas to go on a two-year acquisition binge à la Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO - news). The 17 companies he has bought have given Broadcom technology that it couldn't develop quickly in-house and beefed up its presence in markets for optical, networking and wireless equipment. The ever-increasing stable of companies--combined with Broadcom's internal growth--has presented Nicholas with the sort of managerial challenge that stymies many entrepreneurial executives. So far, he's been up to it. ``I think what I've brought is a no-nonsense, execution-oriented management style that focuses more on results than on the means of getting there,'' he says. And at Broadcom, the results speak for themselves. See: Forbes.com Presents: Top Tech Execs 2000