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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Kim who wrote (117828)	2/16/2001 12:08:34 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

HJ, Here's a PCLN moment from your pal HB: HB is a real genious. If we had bought HB's buys, we would all be broke. That is not a joke either. I have a faxed 20+ page report by him or his staff about Amazon's cash flow. I need to read it soon. It is a Merrill internal memo "thing."

To: Bob Kim who wrote (117828)	2/16/2001 12:09:02 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

Bob, you ask me about Merticom? >Ameri-First Securities Reiterates Metricom, Inc. (MCOM) as an Aggressive Buy With a 12 Month Price Target of $60 The only Investment I currently have in Allens deals is Charter and Transmeta.

To: Bob Kim who wrote (117828)	2/16/2001 11:25:40 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

Bob, OT re:Autonomy. I don't know if it can hold up with its huge p/e but I'm not selling 1 share. Btw Show me a software company making 96% gross margins and i'll buy it! >FTMarketWatch 1:15:00 PM GMT Feb 15, 2001 LONDON (FTMW) -- British information management software company Autonomy Corp.[UK:AU.] [US:AUTN] reported its first full-year profit on Thursday yet met resistance from London analysts. Autonomy, which is listed in New York as well as London, said annual sales trebled to $65.43 million resulting in its first annual pretax profit of $20.6 million. After tax and exceptionals, profit was $13.34 million. In 1999, the company suffered a pre-tax loss of $4.2 million. Adjusted pre-tax fourth quarter profits of $7.96 million slightly missed the analysts' consensus estimate of $8.2 million. But amid a wave of analysts sceptical about growth prospects, the stock fell. In London the stock fell as much as 13 percent before paring the loss. In early Nasdaq trading, Autonomy shares lost 5 percent of their value. Analyst Alex Ryshawy at BNP Paribas said results were pretty much in line with expectations. Others, like Keith Woolcock at Nomura, questioned whether the company's shares were worth their $2.8 billion market valuation. ABN Amro on Thursday downgraded the company's stock to "reduce" from "hold." Autonomy's fourth-quarter sales came in at $21.46 million, up from $17.64 million in the third quarter. This beat the consensus estimate of $20.1 million. Ryshawy at Paribas said if shares didn't perform well, it would be because investors had high expectations for the company. Other analysts said sequential quarterly revenue growth was disappointing and sales costs were too high. Nomura's Woolcock told Dow Jones the company's share price could fall between 20 and 50 percent on concerns over the market Autonomy is in and the company's ability to dominate it. He said the stock was over-valued at 100 times earnings and would be more realistically valued at 50 to 75 times earnings Some felt the company's 44 percent reliance on the U.S. market, where computing budgets are said to be squeezed in the economic downturn, could make it vulnerable. "So far we haven't seen a slowdown there for what we do," chief executive Mike Lynch told journalists on a conference call. He said software companies that offered efficiencies for company systems were still seeing strong demand. Lynch said there had been a lot of recent commentary about the company that either wasn't true or wasn't fair. (See Thom Calandra's column). He said an argument with Merrill Lynch over a statement that Autonomy had lost key development staff to Microsoft was "completely closed" after the investment bank apologised and issued a correction. Merrill Lynch and others have also said a new Microsoft [US:MSFT] product could pose a competitive threat to Autonomy. Lynch rebutted these claims on Thursday telling journalists, "the consensus is it is a lightweight document management system for the masses, it does not compete with Autonomy," he said. Lynch also attacked criticism of the company's prolific use of press releases, saying it only made announcements when it had signed significant deals or released a major new product. New product Autonomy also announced on Thursday the release of a new product. It said "AXE" would allow better labelling of Web page information to enable improved database interrogation. Current use of the standard Web data description method XML (Extensible Markup Language) required tags to be added manually, he said, and it lacked context. Autonomy's AXE XML engine would "look up what someone means by that tag," he said. "[The terms] 'glider' and 'aeroplane' are near but as far as XML is concerned it may as well be aardvark. "It pretty much replaces products people are buying from, say, Software AG [DE:724264]," he said. But Software AG and e-commerce specialists such as Commerce One [US:CMRC] and Ariba [US:ARBA] were potential Autonomy customers, not rivals, he added. Lynch said the year 2000 had seen Autonomy establish itself as the standard in automating the management of unstructured information. He said AXE would allow the company to extend into semi-structured and structured information. "Perhaps more importantly, our fourth quarter and year-end results highlight our profitable and scalable business model... marked by consistently high gross margins and increasing profitability," he said. The company's practice of selling through third parties for licensing revenue is seen as effective in keeping costs low while gaining many more customers at a time. __ "...they have a very strong business model, it's very lean. It allows them to have pretty solid profit margins." - BNP Paribas analyst Ryshawy agreed that the company's results vindicated its business model. "It shows they have a very strong business model, it's very lean. It allows them to have pretty solid profit margins." He said the one thing that the market would possibly have liked to see more of was more income in the bag from those third parties. "It's up 84 percent but still in gross terms it's a small figure." Analysts complained that the company's agreements with third parties who resell the company's software were lacking big corporate names. Lynch said Nasdaq rules stopped him from making forward-looking financial statements regarding this income, but said the company was on track to reach its goal of gaining four-to-five such deals each quarter. He added it had $137 million in cash.