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

To: Todd N who wrote (48729)	6/15/1998 7:37:00 PM
From: Gary Wisdom	Respond to of 61433

WSJ article posted today: Asia Keeps Buying Products to Build Digital Networks ---- By Wayne Arnold Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal Hold on to your hats: Here is some good news for companies trying to sell products in Asia. Demand for the nuts and bolts of digital networks has been relatively unscathed by the region's economic carnage. Telecommunications companies, especially those in China, are still hungrily buying, and so are companies that sell access to the Internet. That is helping companies such as Ascend Communications Inc., of Alameda, Calif., and Singapore-based Datacraft Asia Ltd., which concentrate sales efforts on these customers. Asian-market leader Ascend, for example, expects sales in Asia, excluding Japan, to rise roughly 40% this year, buoyed by sales of its switches and modems, said Anthony Wise, general manager of Ascend's Asian-Pacific operations, in an interview. Sales at Datacraft, meanwhile, still are exceeding targets, said Sam Lin, the company's director of business development. Datacraft will report earnings in mid-July. "I'm legally not allowed to tell you how happy I am," Mr. Lin said. In a report last week, market-research firm IDC Asia/Pacific Ltd. said sales of remote-access servers, which allow users to dial into company networks and Internet services, rose 81% in 1997. Compare that with the region's market for personal computers, which last year grew less than 3%. The strongest growth in remote-access demand was in Taiwan, where sales of the devices nearly tripled thanks to big orders by the island's two largest Internet services, IDC said. Even strife-torn Indonesia's market posted 17% growth in sales. But Ascend and other networking companies say China remains their most important source of new sales, as telephonenetwork operators there invest in state-of-the-art networking equipment to extend their reach into rural areas untouched by telephony. Mr. Wise estimates China and Taiwan will account for roughly 45% of Ascend's Asian sales outside Japan this year, compared with one-third last year. Earlier this week, Datacraft unveiled a $12 million contract from the Fujian Post and Telecommunications Authority, the company's largest contract in China so far. Mr. Wise predicts sales in South Korea and Southeast Asia will slip this year, but only slightly. Big telecommunications companies in the region are weathering the crisis well, he said, thanks to the dollars they collect from the U.S. for completing calls from there to Asia. Even where economic hardship is forcing consolidation among Internet services, he said, survivors are forced to invest in new networking equipment to make room for rivals' customers.