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Technology Stocks : ACTM $100 Million Cable Modem Contract with MOT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neal Hopper who wrote (532)	2/27/1998 4:08:00 PM
From: kolo55	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1250

I think that's a great question. From an e-mail I wrote last night: I was at the BofA Robertson Stephens tech conference all day yesterday and today. I couldn't follow the stock market today. Yesterday they had computers and internet on all over the meeting floor. Today, I couldn't even get on that floor because the president and secret service took it over. The rest of us were packed into some small secondary meeting rooms. If I get time tonight, I'll post comments on some of the ECM companies on the various threads. I attended presentations by PKE, JBIL, SCI, FLEXF, and PLXS. The news was pretty uniformly good, so ACTM recent announcement stands out in sharp contrast. Therefore I didn't buy any today on the big drop. I think I'll let it settle a bit, but I don't think this company is a flim-flam. I just think the management doesn't have its act together, and has an enormous reluctance to warn investors of bad news. Inventory contol systems are critical to the success of ECM companies. The Q ended almost two months ago; management must have been aware of the problem shortly after inventory was taken at the end of December. They just delayed publicly telling us for some time. In the meantime they must have been talking to insurance people, possibly law enforcement, and of course, some employees. The word filtered out; hence the sell-off before the announcement last night. This is what troubles me the most; this is twice that management has deliberately withheld bad news from shareholders for an extended period of time. They knew about the probable loss of 3Com almost a year in advance, and now this. In fact they basically waited until they were almost forced to reveal it in quarterly reports both times. Still, this company could come back. I am still tempted to buy. My losses in ACTM now are almost made up by the gain in PLXS. And FLEXF could break into new highs soon, that holding is much much higher than the size of my ACTM holdings . But if I can buy $250M+ of quality annual ECM revenues for $108M, that seems cheap. The question is whether its deservedly cheap. Paul