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

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (120558)	6/17/2002 1:13:09 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

as for AWE's net debt being only 3BB (as of the Feb article), i suspect there are other off-balance-sheet assets that bring the total debt down to 3BB. You guys are talking apples and oranges....Clark is looking at the latest 10Q (from May) and you are citing an article from February. AWE had a $3 billion bond offering in April.... attws.com They also bought Telecorp at some point in February (which also probably added to the debt). Slacker

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (120558)	6/17/2002 1:36:34 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Mucho - let me just state that it's not like i'm a real fan of AWE over PCS (although i switched from PCS to AWE due to service problems at PCS). No problem. I just think of you as Mr Negative. If this were the AWE board you'd be all over them.<g> my point is really about what a horribly deep hole PCS has dug for themselves with their huge debt, and how AWE is better off by comparison due to a much lighter debt load. I can acknowledge that PCS' debt position is substantially worse than AWE's (although perhaps we don't agree on exactly how much). Why can't you acknowledge that from a cash flow situation AWE's is substantially worse than PCS'? And it is almost certainly due to their choices of technology. (Too bad there isn't a AWE board since I am sure that on that board you'd be happy to rip AWE there! <g>) i think you're off on this one, Clark. first of all, the article was written by Andrew Bary, a Barron's staff reporter who was at the helm of The Trader column for a couple years. he's quite well-respected and with all due respect for your technical expertise, i suspect he knows more about finances than you do. It is possible he's right, but my personal use for 'respected experts' is pretty minimal unless I have no time to vet them. I am much more cynical now about experts than I was 10 years ago: 1) The Stanford Professor of Comm Engineering who proclaimed that CDMAOne would never work. 2) My textbook on CDMA which completely screwed up the capacity calculations for a CDMA cell network. 3) All the 'tech savy' news reporters completely sucked in by the Ericsson PR 2 years ago. Or, on a more personal level: 4) The number of engineering projects I've worked on where some supposed experts made some ghastly mistakes. Counting on violations of Newton's laws being one such mistake. 5) The number of times doctors have told someone close to me things I knew to be absolutely false. Sometimes they had an agenda, sometimes just bias or stupidity or being several years behind the times. 6) The number of patent lawyers who know all the rules, but don't really understand the system and thus make bizzarre mistakes. 7) The whole basis of economics was, until the last decade or so, based on the bizzarre assumption that human beings were rational. What were they thinking? I am not picking on any one profession, but the whole 'respected expert' thing is something I would suggest that anyone bright enough try to avoid. Vet them yourself. as for AWE's net debt being only 3BB (as of the Feb article), i suspect there are other off-balance-sheet assets that bring the total debt down to 3BB. e.g., there might be committments from DoCoMo which do not appear on the balance sheet (this is just a guess). i am not going to bother trudging through all of AWE's SEC documents and calling up their IR to find out for sure. i will just take Bary at his word and i don't think he's lying Perhaps there are indeed some off-balance-sheet items, but in this post Enron era I would assume that to be an important story in and of itself, and certainly worth mentioning. As for whether he is lying, I agree that this is unlikely. But there are many many other ways bias can leak into an opinion - as you are so fond of pointing out to the QCOMers on this thread. Or it could just be that he was misled by AWE or he didn't do his homework or ... . There are some analysts I trust (Herb G being one - although I think that as a person he's pretty annoying), but most aren't worth much as evidenced by their mutual fund bretheren who as a group cannot outperform the market. depreciation and amortization don't show up in cash flow either (i.e., they are added back to cash flow from the income statement), yet people have been happily reconciling those for ages.* Yes they do show up - as the original charge for capital expenditures. And that was my point. The difference between the cash flow statement and the income statement is supposed to be only a matter of timing. The reconciliations into the 10Q to account for timing changes is acceptable, but that is the only thing that should be reconciled IMO. Putting a ficticious charge in earnings for options would require reconciliation that was not timing related. BTW - I have gotten as much out of the options debate as I am going to, so I only answered this because I had forgotten that I owed you a response to this. I will not further debate on the topic of options. Clark