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

To: D.E. Lee who wrote (51100)	7/31/1998 7:10:00 PM
From: hitesh puri	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

I agree on the point that Ascend could not wait for LU to come around and then start working along with their SS7 products to integrate it with their switches. Secondly Lucents competing products with Stratus may not quite match up. That explains why Stratus equipment has close to 70% of market share. Having overlapping products especially when they are not big contributors to the revenue chain is no biggie. Even Cascade had a remote access product line (quite a good one too from what I heard) but that did not prevent the ASND/CSCC merger ? On top of that if Ascend does buy Stratus at around $800 million, a PSR of 1, it gets assets worth $697 million which includes $277 million in cash and about $100 million in accounts receivable. Heck that sounds one great deal. Plus on top of that I am sure they could sell the non-telecom related computer divisions which account for half of the company to HWP or SUNW and maybe get $200-300 million for that. The more you dissect it the more you wonder about why this makes LU salivate any less. Remember that a lot of people have been sitting on 100%+ gains in the last 6 months so such a run for the hills is not out of line and also not indicative of crappy management. The impression I got from them in the shareholder meeting was that they want the best for the company and the shareholders and thus were conservative. My feeling is that one of the Stratus personnel must have leaked this info to the paper so ASND tanks and they get a sweeter deal. I doubt Ascend would want to renegotiate and even if it weren't for the leak the sick market condition today would have brought ASND into 49 range anyways. After such a long post I would be upset if the deal did not go through. :-) -hitesh