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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David E. Taylor who wrote (4241)	3/16/2001 2:20:54 PM
From: Win-Lose-Draw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6784

Given your aversion to GS, maybe that's your "buy" signal! LOL! Yeah, GS are at it again, parading Abby around, telling everyone to buy. Which, too me, would be a sell signal if I actually held anything that could go down. Now, if Abby would suddenly have a change of heart and say that maybe we should expect a little more pain, I'd back the truck up and load it with everything I could get my hands on. I love Goldman Sachs!

To: David E. Taylor who wrote (4241)	3/16/2001 3:03:30 PM
From: David E. Taylor	Respond to of 6784

I'd better qualify that last post where I said: Either PC Data (who monitor about 65% of brick and mortar retailers and no on-line e-tailers or direct sales channels as far as I know) or Tom of this thread is totally out in left field on sales in February. Tom Clarksburg's data are for Palm's shipments to on-line sellers and brick and mortar retailers (generally through channel distributors), and Palm books those sales as revenues once a firm purchase order has been received, the product has shipped, and there is a reasonably certain assurance that Palm will get paid on the P.O. They make some allowances for returns and maybe co-promotion expenses, but essentially once the product leaves the manufacturing facility, it's booked on the top line as revenues. OTOH, PC Data tracks actual retail sales, I believe just through a 60-65% sampling of brick and mortar sales outlets like Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, et al. So their data is basically "sell through to end user" data, and will typically lag manufacturing shipments a month or so because retailers (and on line sellers) have to keep inventory. On the Q2 (or maybe Q1) CC, Yankowski said they liked to keep around 45 days of inventory out there (reflected approximately by the 245 million of receivables on the Q2 balance sheet). The tricky part of course is to balance shipments against sales forecasts to keep that inventory more or less constant. As we have heard repeatedly, various Palm models have been out of stock or in short supply for the last 6-9 months, because Palm has been unable to make enough product to meet demand, even without aggressive marketing promotion which we are just now beginning to see. So, it's possible that both Tom and PC Data are correct, i.e. Palm shipped a ton of product in the last 3 weeks of February, which doesn't show up in PC Data's February end user sales data because it wasn't sold in February. Given this disparity, if Palm comes in with revenues in-line or ahead of guidance, there are bound to be questions about the sell through rate and March re-orders from distributors and re-sellers. Having been burned twice with Compaq in the past shipping tons of PC's in the last 3 weeks of a quarter and then selling zip for 4-6 weeks as the inventory bulge is worked off, this all gives me an uneasy feeling. We need to hear from Palm in the Q3 report that now the component supply problem is more or less gone and they aren't facing manufacturing constraints, they expect a more linear manufacturing and sales rate through Q4 and beyond. David T.