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Technology Stocks : Siebel Systems (SEBL) - strong buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (6634)	4/7/2003 12:38:53 AM
From: hueyone	Respond to of 6974

Its fairly obvious who is left to be taken out, if they have a stock price in the single digits or are delisted already. For the record, I don't think single digits means what it used to. It is not a very good indicator whether a company will survive. Many tech companies trade in the single digits today simply by virtue of having taken too aggressive a strategy with stock splits during the bubble. They didn't leave enough room after splits for the bubble to pop and to keep them out of single digits.<g> Even Cisco and Oracle have traded in the single digits in the last year, and I expect Oracle to revisit single digits soon. But I don't think Cisco, Oracle or even Sebl are in danger of going out of business in the next few years, even though it is still my wag that a chance will come again to buy their shares at significantly lower prices. The Forbes article said there were 70 software companies trying to operate in sales force automation, but that SEBL is the leader. I think there are still a lot of companies that need to be taken out and we are looking at least another couple of more years to make more significant headway on consolidation to allow the survivors to be more profitable. More snips: But if everyone hangs on, no one profits. Many in high tech fret over how long these companies will wait for others to die. "This bottleneck has to get rationalized," says Terence Garnett, who invests in software for the venture firm Venrock. "How many do we need? A hundred software companies? Maybe--and a few small ones to feed things to them." The weaklings are long on a never-say-die attitude. Despite all the high-tech turmoil, only 63 publicly held software outfits have been acquired in the past two years. "We've been going to the smaller companies to see if they would consider putting themselves up for sale, but there's no sense of urgency," says Revell Horsey, the managing director of Banc of America Securities. A couple of interesting snips relating to Sun and Dell: At Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, its executive vice president, gets 50 offers a month to buy software companies. Some venture capitalists "come by with their whole portfolio, saying, ‘Buy what you want,'" he says. Sun needs to expand in software to enhance its sagging server sales, but Schwartz expects that it will buy only ten or so small companies in the next year. Dell Computer will be similarly choosy, says Michael Dell, the CEO. "The rational thing to do would be for the [software] companies to just return their money to the investors," he says. As for the rest, he says, "You've got 8,000 to 10,000 companies out there, just ticking away. They'll just clip coupons or whatever until this ends." forbes.com JMO, Huey