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Technology Stocks : Loral Space & Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rocket Scientist who wrote (4326)	8/24/1998 11:14:00 PM
From: Valueman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10852

RS: I will get you a better response tomorrow, but you just can't project the last two quarters out to the end of the year, or out into 99. Take SS/L for instance. A substantial payment is made by the customer upon in-orbit delivery. What have they launched this year? NADA! What will they launch? PAS-7, PAS-8, MCI-1, Tempo-1, & Telstar-6--ChinaSat-8 is also to be launched, but I don't have my notes here, so I am not sure if it is a 98 model or not. All these will pay up at that time. L-Star 1 and L-Star 2 are on hold, with one of those expected to be restarted soon, and the other will likley be bought and used by Loral. So there is no "E" in EBITDA unless you are launching satellites and getting paid. That will happen soon. As far as 99, you are forgetting 4 CD Radio sats, 2 Intelsat birds, Telstar 8, 9 and 10, Orion 2, Europe*Star, Skybridge, the space station parts, and hopefully Optus, Nahuelsat, and Intelsat-K. More to come.

To: Rocket Scientist who wrote (4326)	8/25/1998 11:42:00 AM
From: Valueman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10852

Subject: Re: Stock prices Date: Tue, Aug 25, 1998 09:27 EDT From: Readware Message-id: <1998082513270400.JAA29174@ladder03.news.aol.com> (1) FY 1998 estimates were based on the company's November 1997 published business plan. (2) B/c of the Asia sat issues, Loral took this year $400 million of SSL revs. So, revs now become for the year $1.4 billion. Loral has stated it expects to incur no monetary loss from the postponed sats. Thus, at some point the $400 million will show up again in SSL as either an intercompany sales or outright sale, but not as a liability. (3) Skynet revs and Orion revs are on track from my FY 1998 estimates so far. The pushout of Telstar 7 to next year, and Orion F3 to next year, however reduce the total FY 1988 estimated revs for those divisions now by about 17% (3) The company has $51 million in development costs the first half of 1998-- far more than expected. That comes out of EBITDA. Thus you cannot read the EBITDA number that was published for the 1st 2 qtrs without looking at development costs. (4) Intercompany elimnations (sat sales probably from SSL to G* and Skynet) reduced revs by $131 million for first half. (5) FY 1999 eps are not worth posting till a number of new (scheduled) satellites are in-orbit. The estimates will push out 1999 numbers to 2000 as the company has pushed two Skynet sats further into 2000 and opted to concentrate on EuropeStar construction. While there are some tables looking at FY 2002, until Skybridge details its various business operations, C numbers become academic. FY 2000, according to LOR's business plan made available to institutional investors in June, have materially higher revenue projections than the November 1997 businessplan for FY 2002. However, till some satellites are launched and functioning in orbit, projecting any estimates beyond 1998 are relatively uninformative from my perspective. Probably the best time to put out new estimates would be sometime in March of 1999. And they wopuld be tentative, preliminary at best. (6) The company plans on 16 sats in orbit by 2002, the current number that PanAmSat has now in-orbit. Using a 70% utilization rate, that should bring GEO revs somewhere in the neighborhood of $780 million for FY 2002. That excludes C/Skybridge and G (which is LEO). However, this is all preliminary, and awaiting actual new satellites in orbit.