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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rudedog who wrote (21766)	3/14/1998 11:44:00 AM
From: Jason W. France	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Rudedog, anytime you talk about IDC or dataquest data you must deal with abit of ambiuguity. what markets, what segments what quarters??? etc etc etc I did see a presentation recently that quoted Q3 IDC data in the US business market for servers with CPQ at 35%, Dell at 18% and IBM and HP at about 16 or 17. Yes CPQ is clearly the leader in the server space, and that creates huge risks for them if a company like dell for example can either take share away (i.e. dell server busines is growing at like 10X the market rate) or deflate the fat margin structure of cpq's server business we can get into a heated debate on the exact market numbers but instead lets agree that CPQ is clearly number one, Dell is growing very fast and might be # 2 3 or maybe even 4 depending on how you cut the data So I post you two questions . Given that Dell entered the server business in a robust way only two years ago, and are already headed for a # 2 mkt position and that they are are still growing at 100-200%(can't remem exact nums per dell's q4 numbers) First question: What is compaq going to do to fend off this obivious threat to their fat server margins, thus a threat to their earnings stream? A second question to you, what % of cpq's revenue do you think comes from their server business (this is public info) , what % of cpq's earnings do you think that come from their server business (this is not public and you can only guess but I would be intrigued to hear your's or anyone else's answer). these are very serious questions that must be asked. enquiring minds want to know. Eckhard knows the answers, Mr. mason knows the answers. These answers are part of a much longer list of issues that keep them up at night. wondering how they are going to keep CPQ shareholders happy over the next few years. I would welcome your answer to my two questions Jason