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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock bull who wrote (83936)	12/6/1998 12:49:00 PM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Stock Bull, Here are the numbers for CPQ net worth as approximated by their current assets and current liabilities: Year CA CL CA-CL 1997 12017 5202 6815 1998(3) 14770 10356 4414 The net worth of the company was reduced by 2.4 B by the acquisition of DEC. Bear in mind that this is probably a conservative estimate since CPQ has not yet expensed all the costs of the acquisition including severance for employees it will layoff. One good thing that is noteworthy is that CPQ has no long term debt. But their available cash to run the combined companies is about 2/3 what it was to run CPQ alone. Regards, Jim Kelley

To: stock bull who wrote (83936)	12/6/1998 3:08:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 176387

I'm not sure what Jim Kelley is trying to get at with his analysis, I expect CPQ to do about $11B in 4Q with net profit of about $700M, which would indicate they would fully pay for DEC in about another 3 qtrs not 31 qtrs. Jim seems pretty sour on CPQ. He has made some good calls in the past but I don't follow this current thinking at all. As far as the PE comparison, doing a trailing PE on CPQ is just silly, it's future performance that is of interest and PE does not seem to have much to do with stock price anyway. Also DELL and CPQ are in increasingly different businesses, certainly the dynamics of the businesses are diverging sharply, and so determining investment strategies WRT the 2 companies is a lot more complex than it was 2 years ago.