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Technology Stocks : PSFT - Fiscal 1998 - Discussion for the next year -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (4055)	1/1/1999 9:14:00 PM
From: davesd	Respond to of 4509

Here's the story.... In the company's latest concession to lower expectations, PeopleSoft Inc. is lopping nearly 1 million square feet from a planned corporate campus in eastern Dublin. Under a proposal scheduled to be presented to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors next week, Pleasanton-based PeopleSoft will pitch plans for a 650,000-square-foot campus on about 30 acres that the company wants to purchase in a business-and-residential development called Emerald Glen. Earlier this year, PeopleSoft had tentatively committed to buying 47 acres in Emerald Glen to accommodate 1.6 million square feet of office space, said Stuart Cook, a project planner for Alameda County's Surplus Property Authority, which is overseeing the project. The 17 acres that the 640-acre Emerald Glen had previously earmarked for PeopleSoft will probably be sold to another company looking for a corporate campus or to a hotel developer, Cook said. The land, located near the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station, is considered prime property. PeopleSoft's less ambitious plan for Dublin amounts to the latest in a series of reality checks for one of the East Bay's great success stories of the 1990s. While the bloom is by no means off the rose for PeopleSoft, the computer software company's growth prospects are lookingless fertile. After increasing its revenues by more than 50 percent annually for several years, PeopleSoft now expects its growth to range from 25 percent to 35 percent as demand for its human resources software slackens. The slowdown has grounded the company's once high-flying stock and prompted management to curb a hiring spree that added about 2,600 employees this year; PeopleSoft last month said it will add between 1,000 and 2,000 workers in 1999. Had PeopleSoft fulfilled its vision of a 1.6 million-square-foot campus in Dublin, the company planned to employ about 6,000 workers there. The company's future payroll in Dublin now figures to be considerably smaller, although PeopleSoft officials couldn't provide specific estimates Wednesday. The company's decelerating growth isn't the only reason behind the change of heart in Dublin, said PeopleSoft spokesman Andrew McCarthy. Since the company first began drawing up its blueprints for the Dublin campus, PeopleSoft acquired two pieces of land totaling 35 acres near its 380,000-square-foot headquarters in Pleasanton's Hacienda Business Park. PeopleSoft paid $50 million for the two parcels during the three months ended Sept. 30, according to company filings with government regulators. The additional Pleasanton real estate, coupled with the acquisition of even more office space as part of a $45 million purchase of Alameda-based Intrepid Systems, also helped persuade PeopleSoft that it needed less space in Dublin, McCarthy said. Even as it pulls in the reins, PeopleSoft remains a thoroughbred in the stable of high-tech firms along the Interstate 680 and 580 corridors.The company, which employs roughly 2,000 workers in Pleasanton, is on a pace to earn about $150 million this year on $1.3 billion in revenue. If county supervisors approve the proposed Dublin campus, PeopleSoft still will be the biggest tenant in Emerald Glen, Cook said. The next biggest office project in the development is a 590,000-square-foot complex being built by the Koll Co.