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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bucky89 who wrote (47208)	5/20/1998 7:15:00 AM
From: gbh	Respond to of 61433

With Livingston, LU can threaten to compete with Ascend, instead of acquire them if the asking price is too high. The price for Livington ($600M?) would be a hugely positive ROI if they get Ascend (market cap ~$9B) to reduce their asking price by even 10%. Bucky, an interesting spin, and one I hadn't thought of. Also, Livingston sells mainly to the small to medium ISPs, whereas ASND is selling to medium to large and very large ISPs, so this would make sense from a market coverage view. But the new PM4 is clearly targeted at large ISPs, in direct competition to ASND and COMS and CSCO. I suspect this is the main product that LU was interested in. Yurie's product is a small ATM switch. If you want call it an "ATM concentrator", then that's your perogative, but I doubt very many customers are using it as such. This is clearly a product for the enterprise market, not the carrier market. I don't think this can be called a switch, as there is no switch fabric in the box. Just a CPU and lots of SW. I think your right about the target market, but it does compete with the SA directly. LU's primary customers are carriers. If you had to choose a product portfolio, wouldn't you choose the products that your favorite customers are craving for??? Yes, and its might be why they will buy ASND anyway. I just think they kind of wasted $1.6B in the mean time. Oh well, it hasn't hurt their share price. :) Gary