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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Koligman who wrote (171004)	9/28/2002 9:13:31 PM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Jittery Investors Await Wednesday's News From Dell By MARK VEVERKA The eyes of techland are on Texas. On Wednesday, Michael Dell will gather analysts and ink-stained wretches alike at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin for the computer-maker's fall 2002 analyst conference. Of course, analyst pow-wows are an everyday occurrence, but it doesn't take much with these jittery markets to send tech shares tumbling. Or spiking, for that matter, as witnessed last week with Nasdaq's brief recovery led by semiconductors, urged on by short-covering and company utterances at the Banc of America Securities stock conference on Nob Hill. If Oracle was a bellwether for enterprise software, then Dell Computer is a proxy for personal computers, chips and, perhaps one could argue, broader tech spending in general. Analysts who cover the company closely are not looking for any surprise bombshells next week. Then again, if they knew of such developments, there'd be no surprise, would there? Nonetheless, if Dell stays true to form, it should be steady as it goes, with the company reiterating its guidance for about 4%-6% revenue growth for this quarter ending Oct. 31, says Ashok Kumar, senior research analyst for U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and a long-time Dell watcher. "They continue to operate like clockwork. Unfortunately, the conditions are not very accommodating," Kumar told Barron's in a telephone interview. Once again, boring is better. The best-case scenario for next week is that Dell does not signal that its growth is slowing down any more than what is already baked in to the equation. For any good news to come from the summit in Texas, it would take Sir Michael telling the world that corporate tech spending is picking up. Even Anna Nicole Smith knows that ain't going to happen. "It's unlikely that Dell will make any pronouncement of a market turnaround. There is nothing in the tea leaves that allows them to say that," Kumar predicts. Dell has been hanging in there, pounding away and grabbing market share where it can. But the fact of the matter is that Dell's personal-computer business has been roughly flat -- at about 3 million units per quarter for the past three quarters in a row, Kumar notes. "The over-arching theme is that the company faces a mature IT market," with a lack of new income streams to pick up the slack, he adds. That is not for lack of trying. Dell has expanded into servers, storage and generic white boxes, and has plans to enter the handheld device fray. Plus, the company finally unveiled its course of action on the printing and imaging front: It announced last week that it would partner with supplier Lexmark International to sell Dell-branded ink-jet printers. Dell's long-awaited entrance into the domain of arch-rival Hewlett-Packard has been a popular topic of speculation in this column, and the company's deal with Lexmark gets its foot in the door. But don't expect printers to bolster the bottom line any time soon. Because expanding into printing and imaging is a long-term strategic move aimed more at harming Hewlett-Packard's cash cow than lifting Dell's profits. In the early-stages at least, Dell will not benefit from selling the ink. "The company is not positioned to participate in the profit pools, which are consumables," Kumar notes Dell and Lexmark both hope to continue to take market share in hardware from H-P; Lexmark's already been doing this with lower-end ink-jet machines. That would reduce H-P's installed base, which in turn stymies the amount of ink it can sell. Still, to put everything in perspective, Dell only racks up roughly $500 million worth of printing and imaging hardware a year, selling one printer for every personal computer it ships. And that is a drop in the ocean for a company that generated $31 billion last year. Thus, at the end of the day -- the end of Wednesday to be specific -- all eyes will be on the Powerpoint slide that talks about the future of PC sales. Says Kumar: "It's all about corporate tech spending. Everything else is a sideshow."

To: John Koligman who wrote (171004)	9/30/2002 10:53:30 AM
From: D.J.Smyth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

John, listened to what? Bill has changed boats. Whatever boat is going downstream he seems to be in. His reasoning for Dell's demise from three years ago has changed relative to his reasoning today. It seems to me this man shots with buckshot. What negative prophecy are we supposed to put faith in when the underlying reasons for his 'America down the tubes' theory keeps changing? Maybe we should all try living in the Philippines for a couple of years? Then come back and revisit this country and its businesses. I'd love to hear what Bill would say about all the corruption in the Philippines. Bill would go insane with all his negative pronoucements...yet somehow the Philippines' small stock market keeps on chugging. The world market, including Dell, is principally down due to a failed internet revolution, 9-11, and other economic factors... What in Bill's pronouncements predicted the failure of the 'world economy' and the 'internet business model'? Why is he mesmerized with the buying/selling of puts of a cash-rich company like Dell? The world economy sinks and product purchases tend to get squeezed. Economics 101. Has Bill ever made the claim that Dell's problems are mainly a direct result of the world economy as a whole? Why does he instead choose to focus on Dell management's decision to purchase puts? What relative value has this "put purchase scenario" by Dell managment placed on Dell's stock price (from its high)? $2 -$3 dollars? What relative value has the downturn in the world economy had on Dell's stock price? $20 - 30$? You're smarter than me, so I'm asking you... What is really strange to me is why the Fed, in this interest rate environment, has been tightening up the cash supply? What are they thinking? The cash pool to support stocks is being squeezed. At what point does the Fed decide to open its doors? Interest rates are at an all time low, you'd think the Fed would be opening up... Their thinking is very confusing