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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (117399)	4/25/2002 9:38:16 AM
From: Cooters	Respond to of 152472

I remember reading about a May analyst meeting recently, but do not know if a date has been set.

To: slacker711 who wrote (117399)	4/26/2002 9:35:51 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Hmmm....even if I had tried, I might never have been able to ask my W-CDMA infrastructure royalty question. thestreet.com The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week By George Mannes Senior Writer 04/26/2002 07:14 AM EDT 1. Sorry, Wrong Number We always suspected the fix was in. But now we have the proof. What we're talking about is that seasonal ritual peculiar to Wall Street: the quarterly earnings conference call. Specifically, what we're talking about is the climax of this ritual: the question and answer session with analysts. You probably know the routine. After company executives open up the telephone conference with long speeches about how great the company is doing, they open up the call for questions from the audience. "Just press -1 on your touch-tone phone," advises the operator, "and you'll be queued up to ask your question." What the operator doesn't say, but what becomes blatantly obvious once you've sat through a bunch of these things, is something like this: "Questions are by no means answered in the order in which they're received. First we'll take calls from analysts who love us and powerful analysts we can't afford to offend. The rest of you, don't hold your breath." Now, even though everyone has figured that the order of the questions isn't exactly first-come, first-served, companies are discreet enough not to reveal their favoratism. Until, that is, BellSouth (BLS:NYSE - news - commentary - research - analysis) conducted its first-quarter conference call last Friday. That's when BellSouth made it incontravertibly clear that questions are answered in the order in which a company damn well pleases. Here's how we at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab discovered the awful truth. After BellSouth held its conference call with Wall Street on Friday morning, the company issued a recording of the call a few hours later, available for playback to anyone calling the designated replay phone number. Except BellSouth didn't post a replay of the company's earnings call. Instead, through the type of error that makes reporters daydream about Pulitzers, BellSouth temporarily posted another conference call. This was a call among the behind-the-scenes staff of the BellSouth call, a call that took place simultaneously with the public call. And the focus of that call was something a lot more interesting than BellSouth's revenue. The discussion, in fact, revolved around the order in which the analysts would ask their questions. Now, we at the Research Lab are often unsympathetic to analysts. But as we listened to the private call ourselves -- and taped it for posterity -- we began to feel sorry for the poor guys. Especially John Hodulik, telecom analyst at UBS Warburg. Here's a guy who -- according to the conversation between a BellSouth investor relations staffer and a conference call operator -- buzzed in to ask a question well before any of his compatriots. But as the call dragged on and more analysts pressed -1, Hodulik kept getting nudged toward the back of the line. First, they moved Frank Governali of Goldman Sachs ahead of Hodulik. Then Adam Quinton of Merrill Lynch behind Governali, but ahead of Hodulik. Then Tim Horan of CIBC World Markets behind Quinton. Then Morgan Stanley's Simon Flannery ahead of Horan. And so on. The eager beaver Hodulik never got to say a word. Caught with the smoking phone in its hand, BellSouth responded with the equivalent of "Yeah? So what?" Spokesman Jeff Battcher says there's nothing wrong with the company holding a spot in the front of the line for, say, an analyst who follows the company especially closely, or who is pressed for time because he has a lot of companies to cover. Analysts who don't get to ask a question, says Battcher, are most assuredly assisted after the call on a one-on-one basis. "The benefit may be to those who get the one-on-one," muses Battcher, "rather than those who ask their question up front." Yeah, we're sure Governali is pretty steamed about having to go first. As for Hodulik, he declined to comment on the honor he received by not having to ask his question at all. Yeah, that's probably exactly what he wanted, after having buzzed in ahead of all his colleagues. But another BellSouth analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the rearrangement "absurd." Not all companies do it, says the analyst, but a lot of large-cap companies do. There's more at stake here, says our source, than the ego stroke and publicity value analysts derive from asking questions on any company's conference call stage: "If it were more on a random basis," says Deep Analyst, "there's potential there would be more probing questions asked, rather than congratulating them on a horrible quarter."