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Technology Stocks : Corel Corp. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James P Shaw who wrote (5607)	9/25/1998 9:30:00 AM
From: Bill Keating	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9798

Reflections upon listening to conference call: The call was short, lasting only about 45 minutes while up to 1 1/2 hours had been planned for. The Merrill Lynch analyst seemed the most skeptical. He noted that accounts payable had increased to around 45 million dollars and tried to get an explanation of what had caused the increase. Corel in my opinion dodged the question. In response to his question, O'Reilly swore that sales into the channel exactly equaled sales out. The analyst then noted that sales out had remained essentially flat from quarter two to quarter three, although Corel was trying to give the impression of a substantial increase. The analyst said he would have more questions later, but never did. Netwinder was a popular subject for questions. Corel said that sales were currently "in the hundreds." They talked of great interest by many parties: channel, VARS, OEMs and more, but had no specifics and no revenue projections. Netwinder could still be smoke in my opinion. There were no questions about jBridge and only limited commentary by Corel. They gave no date for release of beta or final product and said there were more deals in the works with software companies like the Sybase contract. My speculation: jBridge was supposed to be targeted at USERS for whom the product would work with ANY application. Is Corel finding that they can not pull this off technically and instead must customize jBridge to work with specific software applications under contract? Corel emphasized that the transition from Wordperfect in Utah to Wordperfect in Ottawa was going wonderfully well, that key personnel from Utah had remained aboard to aid in the transition and that Wordperfect 9 was still on schedule for the first half of next year. Corel stated that absent the charge this quarter for shutting down Utah, they would have posted an 8 million dollar profit for the quarter. They implied that they expected to be profitable by around that amount next quarter, but Cowpland would not say it outright. Finally, in response to a question, Corel said that it did not know if Novell had changed its plans about dumping all its Corel stock, but that in any event they were limited to selling only about 700 thousand shares per quarter, so Novell should not have a great impact on share price even if they continue dumping.