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Technology Stocks : THQ,Inc. (THQI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Quad Sevens who wrote (3258)	1/29/1998 4:34:00 AM
From: Todd D. Wiener	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14266

If WCW sold 450,000 in stores, then THQ shipped more than that amount. I suspect that THQ shipped at least 600,000 units in Q4. That could be at least $20 million in Q4 sales. Assuming demand remains strong, WCW should help Q1 nicely. According to these 3rd party reports of sales, I underestimated WCW sales (I estimated 400,000 from THQ), and overestimated Pax substantially, assuming the PCData was close. My estimate for Pax sales FROM THQ, not in stores, was close to 300,000. That would seem to be much too high. I am currently trying to identify the source of error (big error!) in my estimates. Although my associates and I did manually check many shelves for product sell-through, we did a large portion of information gathering via telephone discussions with store managers across the country, among various retailers. It is possible that weekly calls to gauge sell-through by inquiring about inventory levels and reorders were misleading. Perhaps the managers provided incorrect information (such as telling us that Pax sold 5 copies this week, when it actually sold 5 last week and none this week). Perhaps my extrapolation of data was grossly overstated, due to the sharp drop-off in Pax sales following its release or my focused geographical analysis. Regardless, I'm trying to determine what may have happened to cause this apparent miscalculation. I never expected THQ to beat my estimate of .68, but I figured it would be substantially higher than the Street consensus. I agree that .60 sounds perfectly reasonable. Q1 should be excellent, though, with EPS around .35. I'll have to revise that estimate next week, when I get more info. about the Q4 sell-though of specific products. Todd