To: Mike Buckley who wrote (200 ) 10/31/2003 7:32:15 AM From: hueyone Respond to of 2955 I reverse one-time gains and losses and cash flow relating to employees' exercising of stock options, which has nothing to do with the company making and selling product. If you are still calculating free cash flow like you have over the last year, imo, it is misleading to say that you are reversing the impact of employees exercising stock options in your free cash flow calculation. Simply removing the tax benefit from stock option exercise is not dealing with cash fow related to stock options. You need to remove the actual after tax expense of stock options, the same way this figure will soon be removed from from reported GAAP net income when FASB is finally allowed to implement their recommendation next spring. Or another way to put it, is to say you should carry the after tax expense deduction for stock options from earnings, when FASB begins requiring stock option expense to be deducted from earnings, right on through your free cash calculation. And then the pre tax, non cash expense of stock options should be added back in to the cash flow statement as a finance activity to make your cash flow statement balance out, not added back in as an operations activity. Imo, your free cash flow numbers "from core operations" as you prefer to call it, have been way overstated if they are supposed to actually be a reflection of what the company is generating from core operations. Diluting shareholders to pay employees is not a core operations activity. If a person is seriously interested in what a company is generating from its core business, I suggest they look up Core Earnings for their company on Standard and Poor's company reports. These S&P company reports are generally available for free online at most brokerages in their research sections, and are also available at many public libraries. Here is Standard and Poor's slide show explaining Core Earnings:www2.standardandpoors.com Sebl's Core Earnings for fiscal 2001 and 2002 were negative 461 million dollars and negative 1.083 billion dollars respectively (as listed on the S&P Company reports). JMO, Huey