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

To: srvhap who wrote (10652)	5/9/1998 12:46:00 AM
From: Zephod	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21342

>what do you see in WSTL's bal sheet that makes you comfortable? (Orckit still has 20+MM cash). Is WSTL cheap ?< Srvhap; It would seem the market has a problem with the Orckit story as its only trading at around 280M while Westell is trading at over 400M. Westell's balance sheet doesn't bother me, since you brought up cash -WSTL 50M cash & st equivalents, also WSTL only trading at 2.3X book, ORCTF 7.5X book. >Why is the technology better than Orckits Who said Westell's technology was better? Not sure what you mean. If your talking support of T1.413 Issue 2, compliant DMT solution I agree. >Orckit has there own silicon In this case I'm not sure this is an asset. <http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/news/1998/98010.htm> >Orckit has insider ownership around 65 percent (they believe in their comp) what is the insider ownership in WSTL. Since I would consider Class B shares insider owned...63% >WSTL puts the pieces together and is at the mercy of the big guys Big guys like Orckit? Are you saying the smaller players (including Orckit) aren't in the game? News to John McHale. >I am interested in why you think WSTL is a good investment here Bell Atlantic, LU, BT, GTE CLEC, to name a few Risk/Reward; Sorry I gotta go with Bob, Westell will see 24 before Orckit sees 40. JMHO Dave

To: srvhap who wrote (10652)	5/9/1998 4:07:00 PM
From: Robert L. Ray	Respond to of 21342

Hi Srvhap, Well to tell the truth of the matter when I was comparing WSTL to ORCTF it seems I was working with the wrong numbers so it now isn't quite as clear to me that WSTL is the much better buy of the two. I usually get my information from Yahoo and according to Yahoo WSTL has only 15.3 million shares outstanding for a market cap of only 183 million. After reading both your post and the post after that and looking at the WSTL Edgar filings I see I had the market cap wrong. WSTL of course also has 21 million class B shares that I was unaware of. Sheese, Yahoo has screwed me up before on the true market cap of a company. As far as values go; at the current sales to market cap WSTL still comes out ahead of ORCTF in that regard. After subtracting cash on hand from the market cap of both companies. WSTL has a market cap of about 6.2 times sales and ORCTF has a market cap of about 9.6 times sales. Of course I realize that there's much more to placing a value on a company than just going with the one with the best ratio of sales to market cap. Growth rate of course matters a huge amount. Orckit's growth rate at the moment is better but it's so early in the deployment of adsl that their respective growth rates are very uncertain at the moment. Actually I find it pretty difficult to analyse the adsl players. It's hard for me to read all the information and tell who has the superior product. I'm a firm believer in the future of adsl is why I'm in WSTL. I can't catagorically say they have the best product out there because I've just started looking at these companies and it's all pretty complicated. WSTL has been working with the Telco's in past adsl trials longer than just about anyone so I figure that in the end that will pay off if the product is good. As an aside, I noticed the latest Fortune has an article on Lucent. Although neither WSTL nor adsl was mentioned I did find one item interesting. As far as aquisitions go Lucent is more likely to aquire companies after September 30 than they are at the moment because of some accounting red tape related to their being spun out from ATT. The article states, "Up to now Lucent has been banned from using a low-tax merger method called pooling of interests because of some tax benefits associated with the spinoff, but that prohibition expires Sept. 30. One possible target is Ascend Communications, the $1.2 billion-a-year Alameda, Calif., company that is the industry leader in ATM."

To: srvhap who wrote (10652)	5/9/1998 9:42:00 PM
From: Trey McAtee	Respond to of 21342

srv-- not to play devils advocate, but the R/R is in WSTLs favor because the value of the deals we have is underestimated. that is to say, wall st. isnt giving us much in the way of valuation for contracts we have. in addition, i think the market has overvalued ORCTFs contracts. remember i hold it too. the difference is, i will likely hold ORCTF longer than i will hold WSTL, mostly because i think ORCTF does have a tech edge on WSTL. ORCTF has executed pretty well so far, but the game is just beginning for WSTL. should the integrator model in this segment play out to WSTLs advantage, then it will be worth a lot more than ORCTF, IP or no IP. good luck to all, trey