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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1155)	11/7/1998 1:56:00 PM
From: Teri Stephenson	Respond to of 34857

Positive mention(Nokia) in Barron's(pulled from RMBS thread): Q: Great. Tell us how to invest in bandwidth. McNamee: The problem is, the total market cap associated with bandwidth is a small fraction of the market cap of Intel. That includes Cisco and every other direct play. The problem is scarcity. As a result, almost every pure play on bandwidth, whether Rambus inside the computer, or Cisco, or @ Home, have stratospheric price-to-sales multiples. But there's no rush. The early market leaders are seldom the folks standing when the game ends. Think about PCs. The cycle started in 1978. Microsoft came public in 1986. It was a sound investment decision to wait eight years to put your first dollar into the PC cycle. Q: Dell didn't come public until 1988. Wick: Some of the current options for investing in consumer broad-band are really tiny companies. You can buy cable modem companies like Terayon Communications, or Com21, or chip companies like Broadcom, which has an enormous valuation and almost no float. Roger's right. It's difficult. One thing we've done is place a big bet on Nokia, which has the best wireless handset lineup in the world by a long shot. It's selling at about the same P/E as Motorola and Ericsson, but with much better growth and momentum. McNamee: There are still direct plays that make sense. We're big fans of PMC-Sierra, which is a stock that's been ignored by many investors because they're located in British Columbia. They absolutely dominate many of the components central to high bandwidth solutions in the market now and going forward. Q: Who are their customers? McNamee: Cisco is their largest customer, but they sell to everybody in the high bandwidth business. They sell the physical-layer-interface chips that go into most ATM and frame-relay systems. And then they sell a lot of other components that go into very-high-speed data communications applications. The stock isn't being given away. It's trading at about 30 times estimated 1999 earnings. But the growth rate is much higher than that. Q: Has the stock come down? Wick: Actually, it's within spitting distance of its all-time high. McNamee: There's a small but fanatical ownership base. Landis: It's our biggest holding, for instance. McNamee: It's a reasonably priced stock, and a direct play on what we've been talking about. Cisco is still a great play. Their execution has been fabulous. Again, relative to other things in its category, Cisco is quite expensive. Based on calendar 1999 earnings, it has a P/E in the low 30s. But they have an exceptional management team, and the rising water level in their space helps them enormously. Q: Anyone else? McNamee: Rambus is an exceptionally expensive stock, but as the PC industry moves to a greater focus on bandwidth, Rambus benefits enormously. And they have a business model where they get a royalty from the adoption of their technology inside personal computers. Q: They are not actually making anything. McNamee: Correct. They have a technology that increases the bandwidth between microprocessor and memory. As the speed of microprocessors increases, it's important to have a fatter and fatter pipe to feed the bits from memory. Intel has used a very complex, Rube Goldberg solution to fill the hole. Now they've made a commitment to Rambus, which is a big deal. Q: But isn't the stock a tad expensive? McNamee: Too expensive for us, but maybe not for somebody else. We just happen to think it's one of the really special companies. We own it, but haven't bought it lately. Landis: The problem we all have is finding an Internet play that has an attractive enough valuation. If there were a stock out there called Internet Traffic, we would be lining up to buy it. We'd bid that stock to the sky. Unfortunately, there's no stock called Internet Traffic.

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1155)	11/8/1998 9:25:00 PM
From: DaveMG	Respond to of 34857

Sorry,sorry, must have forgotten where I was. Just sometimes flabbergasted at how cocksure you can be.. Also.."Of course Qualcomm can license Epoc later. But it will lose the first to market advantage if it doesn't start develpment of Symbian stuff now... the first products will be on market within 12 months. Many companies are members of Bluetooth - but the advantage belongs to founding members like Nokia who get their products first to market." What's the relevance of this if no one is interested in having Q as a founding member? Best wishes...Dave