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Technology Stocks : Micron Electronics (MUEI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MONEYMAKER who wrote (2712)	12/22/1997 4:47:00 PM
From: Jim Rogers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4074

Depending on their basis in MCM, they may show a loss from the sale. Does anyone know what they show as their basis? With their fine way of managing things, maybe we can hope that the sale results in a loss plus gives them lots of cash to spend on bad advertising and loose all the cash too! Sounds about like something their FINE management team might do. They need a new ad agency. The idea of "image" advertising is an ad agency's dream. Get to bill lots of time and get lots of commissions for placing the ads but no accountability since it isn't even supposed to produce sales - just "help the image". It is stupid and MUEI management is naive and maybe stupid for buying the idea. They need to spend money on ads that sell computers and that's it. If an ad runs and they don't get calls and orders -- IT WAS A BAD AD. Simple as that. Especially for a BTO computer manufacturer.

To: MONEYMAKER who wrote (2712)	12/22/1997 6:17:00 PM
From: Yakov Lurye	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4074

I wonder what would be the net impact of selling the contract manufacturing division. The unit is priced around $300M (271M = 90% interest), but just a month ago they'd acquired the European contract operation - the price was not disclosed in the announcement. So the net cash inflow will be below $270M. During the last quarter contract manufacturing did well, but prior to this they were lagging (10K gives 1997 gross margin of 11% and $33M). My uneducated guess is that this sale reduces 1998 earnings roughly by 20c/share in exchange for $2/share one-time cash infusion. Unless they'd overpaid for the Colfontein plant, not a bad deal, especially if some big fish decides to acquire MUEI. The question now is what are they going to do with the money?