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Technology Stocks : Corning Incorporated (GLW) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Koligman who wrote (1712)	5/11/2002 10:19:14 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2260

This article doesn't appear to be very well-researched. Corning is caught in a vise of high debt and meager cash flow. It won't have to pay significant debt maturities until 2005, but its current debt load has raised the company's debt-to-equity ratio to 47%, up from 28% when fiber fever was at its height. That equity on Corning's balance sheet, by the way, includes a huge hunk of intangible assets. From now to 2015 Corning has about $1 Billion in debt reductions due; most of that is after 2007. And corning has some $2 Billion in working capital. Intangibles are some $350 Million out of total assets of $12.7 billion. Hardly a "huge" hunk by today's standards (admittedly, because lots of intangibles have already been written off). Some investors take solace in the nearly half of revenues that don't come from telecom businesses; among other things, Corning makes glass for flat-panel displays. But the non-fiber businesses don't have an exciting upside. This appears to be an utterly absurd remark. I can't think of a technology today hotter than flat panel displays -- and over the coming five years they're going to proliferate. It is the only IT technology I can think of where prices are actually rising due to and excess of demand over supply. And these devices aren't limited to IT -- five years from now they're going to be in use for everything from TV sets to advertising billboards. My customers are buying flat panels just for the hell of it. Replacing perfectly working standard monitors at significant cost for no apparent reason, other than to be cool. I think it is foolish to discount the importance of the flat panel display business. The biggest problem, of course, is that Corning can't produce enough of this glass. And, by the way, fiber will be back, at the first sign of a turnaround.