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Technology Stocks : SAP A.G. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Dakota Sullivan who wrote (264)12/12/1997 4:40:00 PM
From: Holger Johannsen  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 3424
 
Asian sales are 13%. Sales growth in Asia in the last quarter was 55%.
Don't know about the projections but SAP stated that the current quarter will not be affected by Asian turmoil.
As a matter of fact, they said today, they would add 5000 people to their current workforce because demand for R3 is very high due to year 2000 problem and the European Monetary Union.
SAP will IMHO not be hit like Oracle. Take a look at this from Mercury News:

Shares of Oracle Corp. lost nearly one-third of their value Tuesday in the heaviest trading day ever for a Nasdaq stock. The massive investor sell-off was driven by worries that the company's core database business is slowing and sales of its other software are faltering in the face of sharpening competition.

Redwood Shores-based Oracle, the nation's second-largest software company and long a darling on Wall Street, dropped a stunning $9.44, or 29 percent, to $22.94, a day after the company disclosed disappointingly slow sales growth. As analyst after analyst cut earnings estimates Tuesday for the coming two quarters, investors traded 172.5 million shares of Oracle's stock.

The plummeting price wiped out more than $9 billion of the company's market value and cut $2.14 billion from Chief Executive Larry Ellison's fortune, dropping the software mogul three notches to seventh in the Forbes 400 ranking of the nation's richest people.

The plunge of so huge a giant -- whose products are little known to consumers but a mainstay for corporations -- stirred enough investor uncertainty about the earnings outlook for other technology companies to pull down the overall market, leaving the technology-heavy Nasdaq with a loss of 5.8 percent.

The trading volume for Oracle shares was not the largest in history. Nasdaq measures volume by counting sell and buy orders separately, while other exchanges count each sell-buy order as one. On the New York Stock Exchange, the record volume was set by Occidental Petroleum, with 103.8 million shares on June 17, 1988.

Oracle said a rapid falloff in demand for its products in Asia, along with a strong dollar that slowed exports globally and a decline in sales to U.S. telecommunications companies, were largely responsible for its weak earnings growth.

But analysts looked for deeper signs of trouble at a company that has long dominated the database business. And they found several key problems, even though most analysts say the long-term outlook for the company remains strong.

Although economic turmoil in Asia, a region that accounts for 15 percent of Oracle sales, contributed to some of the earnings shortfall, the company's core business is in need of a tuneup, analysts said.

''Their database sales were disappointing and their applications sales were disappointing,'' said Carl Olofson, research director at International Data Corp., a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. ''Those have been the drivers for their growth.''

Oracle writes database software, the computer programs that companies use to store and retrieve huge amounts of business information in their computer networks. Although that market represents the core of Oracle's business, its growth has slowed to about 20 percent a year.

In recent years, Oracle also entered the fast-growing market for business applications, the software that taps those databases to help company managers run core business functions such as accounting, human resources, payroll, distribution and manufacturing.

Although Oracle has nearly half the market for large databases, the company is facing tough competition from Microsoft Corp. for medium-sized businesses seeking a low-cost product. It is that low-end market, where the two companies run neck-and-neck with about 30 percent of total sales each, that accounts for most of the growth in the database business today, Olofson said. Microsoft's growth in this area has been more rapid. Oracle has cut its prices significantly to match those of Microsoft. ''Clearly . . . that has cost them revenue,'' Olofson said.

Other analysts said the sluggish performance of the company's applications software could turn out to be the main source of concern in the long term.

''They have been spending a ton of money building up this applications business,'' said Robert Tholemeier, an analyst with First Albany Corp. in New York. Oracle reported $108 million in sales for those products in the second quarter -- a small proportion of its overall $1.6 billion in revenue for the period -- and that is not enough, Tholemeier said. ''Oracle should be doing about $200 million in applications. Their competitors are able to do it.''

The market for business applications was worth $5.4 billion globally in 1996 and is growing at a 50 percent rate, according to IDC. The market is dominated by Germany's's SAP AG, while Oracle, PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton and Baan Co. N.V. of Menlo Park follow far behind.

''People are buying databases because they buy an application,'' Tholemeier said. ''If you lose the applications business you lose revenue and you lose strategic market share against competitors.'' Locking in a customer with a database and the business applications software also guarantees ''no-brainer'' sales of upgrades, add-ons and services, Tholemeier said.

Oracle also could be suffering from its position as both a database and an applications vendor. Companies such as SAP, PeopleSoft and Baan typically team up with a database company and sell their products as an overall package, and they could be pushing the products of Oracle's competitors, who do not compete with them.


''They need to make a decision as to whether their applications business is going to reward them well enough to make up for the fact that it undermines their relationship with the package application vendors,'' Olofson said. ''Up to now, they have believed they can balance those things. Maybe they need to take a second look at that.''

All but two of 26 analysts who follow Oracle started the week with ''buy'' recommendations. Now all but three have downgraded the stock, although many say the company's long-term prospects as good.

Investor attention in the short term is likely to focus on Oracle's competitors to see if are benefiting from the giant's troubles or are suffering along with it.

PeopleSoft, Baan and SAP, who report fourth-quarter earnings in the middle of next month, each lost only a few percentage points Tuesday.

''They see no sign of a slowdown,'' says Salomon Smith Barney software analyst Andrew W. Roskill. ''They seem very bullish for the outlook for the rest of year.''

Darby Dye, investor relations manager for Baan, agreed: ''We see nothing that would indicate that we're off-track.''


Many analysts warn not to read too much into one quarter's performance by Oracle.

''I don't see anything in their product or business strategy that concerns me,'' said Carolyn DiCenzo, director of client server software for San Jose research firm Dataquest Inc. ''I see some experimentation in new business models in markets that are healthy for the company. I would not see this as a long-term problem. The good thing about Oracle is they know their business.''



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Mercury News Staff Writer Adam Lashinsky and the New York Times contributed to this report.